This Explains Man's Fatal Attraction to Communism

From FEE.org (Dec. 4):

“Dan hears the screaming, rushes in, wrestles Alex into the bathtub, and seemingly drowns her. She suddenly emerges from the water, swinging the knife.” (Wikipedia summary of the 1987 movie, Fatal Attraction)

Marxism is like Alex in the movie Fatal Attraction. We thought it was dead as an ideology, but it keeps returning, swinging its hammer and sickle.

Bernie Sanders ran as a socialist and got much of the Democratic vote. A 2016 Harvard Youth Poll found that 51 percent of millennials rejected capitalism. A 2016 poll by YouGov found that favorable views of capitalism were 47 percent among Generation Z; 42 percent among Millennials; and 45 percent among Generation X.

Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, the center of American capitalism, has recently complained that “private property rights” limit his ability to plan for New York. Yet he has just won a second term.

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Try. Fail. Repeat.

Communism’s failures are legion and well known. In the 20th century, Communist regimes killed about 100 million people: 20 million in Russia, 65 million in China, and the rest from a miscellany of countries including Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea and others. North Korea is a failed country; South Korea is rich and prosperous. Similarly, East Germany was poor, and West Germany highly economically successful. Cuba is still poor. China’s economy has been growing as the Marxist influence has declined.

But young people do not know this or ignore it. After all, the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. For those born after about 1985, this is all ancient history. North Korea remains a failure, but that is nothing new if it is even known. The Cold War is before millennials’ time, and the fall of the Wall is something in a history book.

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Folk Economics

Why do so many advocate a system which has failed whenever it has been tried? Communism is based on primitive economic thinking, what has been called “folk economics.” That is, Marxism appeals to those untrained in economics because it is consistent with our primitive beliefs about economics. This is ironic because Marx called his system “scientific socialism,” when in fact it is consistent with a pre-scientific view of the economy.

Our intuitions about economics evolved in the long period called the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness when our ancestors were largely hunter-gatherers. During this period, societies were small, approximately 200 people or fewer; there was virtually no technological progress or economic growth, and the world was zero-sum. Because societies were mobile, there was little capital investment. This entire set of beliefs is exactly consistent with Marxism and its child, socialism.

One of the tenets of folk economics is that the world is largely zero-sum – economic values do not change in response to changes in prices. I have come to believe that this issue – zero-sum thinking – is responsible for most of the major fallacies in economic policy, such as tariffs and immigration restriction. One of the fundamental policies of Marxism is “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Both halves of this proposal are based on zero-sum thinking. They ignore that output depends on incentives as well as ability and needs depend on prices as well as desires.

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Another pillar of folk economics is that labor is the only source of value. This was true when our minds were evolving and there was relatively little capital but certainly is not true now. But the labor theory of value is part of communism. Folk economics does not understand invisible hand theories of social organization, and so communism requires central planning.

While these primitive views are part of our evolved mental structure, it is certainly possible to learn that they are false. But the modern view of economics is not a natural way of thinking. Think of flat earth thinking: our intuition is that the earth is flat, but we can learn that it is not. [read more]

Communism like socialism is regressive not progressive. The far-Left believes the later of course.

Here is another article about communism from Walter E. Williams: Fascism and Communism.