Reflection of video on Socialism Sucks book
One of the largest political discussions right now is the implementation of socialism into our government. Many people argue that Socialist policies will improve aspects of our lives such as healthcare or equality. However, many people do not seem to understand that socialism is more of an economic discussion than an ethical or political discussion.
According to this week's video (Socialism Sucks!) Socialism is the removal of private property and enterprise and replacing it with state-controlled property and business. The problem with this that was mentioned a few times by Benjamin Powell in the video was economic incentives, or rather the lack of them. The reason capitalism is able to grow without a centralized goal is that whenever a business or institution makes a product or provides a service they have an incentive of personal wealth gain to drive to create the best product/ service they can. This usually is beneficial for society because a product will provide more value to the consumers and this tells the providers of goods such as food that what they did was a good thing. When Socialism is implemented all of the private businesses and services are gone, and since no wealth is gained from selling a product or service then no one wants to improve said product or services and may even stop providing said products or services altogether if the government does not support it.
Socialism takes the incentive of wealth and tries to replace it with a controlled system as seen in Cuba; all imports and exports were limited by the government. The main issue with this system is that the government cannot replicate the incentive of better products and services, or at least they cannot replicate it very well. In his example of North Korea which has a very controlled system of government, the amount of economic change ever since the Korean war has been minimal if not worse for the average person living there.
Many people such as Bernie Sanders want to implement “Democratic Socialism” where the aspect of voting for government leaders is still there, but Socialism is still in place. This is a problem for 2 reasons. One is that the economic system is still socialist, and will perform worse without that incentives. The second reason is corruption. Socialism gives all property and privacy to the government. This brings the government just a few steps away from becoming in full control even if the people vote differently. As Benjamin Powell states, without economic freedom, democratic freedom cannot exist. Venezuela was shown in the video as being a great example of this since after their economy collapsed, they were unable to vote their socialist leader and policies out of office. In the video, Powell says that many government employees were told they would be fired if they voted against their current leader.
Overall socialism may seem like a great idea to create economic fairness among the people. However, it instead cripples the economy and digs a political hole that is very difficult to get out of. While capitalism is not perfect it does provide freedom, and that is one thing that many people have fought and died for, and I am not willing to give that up so easily.
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