Today’s apologists for socialism still won’t acknowledge the lessons of the Berlin Wall
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The media has been awash over the past week with stories about the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. My favourite vignette concerns a couple living in East Berlin who were delighted to have a telephone installed in their apartment only weeks before the Wall came down. They had been on the […]
Like the myth of a flat Earth, the socialist conspiracy theory never dies
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The idea that the Earth is flat is a rapidly growing trend on social media. The Flat Earth Society’s Twitter feed has the best part of 100,000 followers. The fact that the planet is a sphere has been known since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. The astronomer Eratosthenes demonstrated it with a […]
From Venezuela to East Berlin, people will always choose capitalism over socialism
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How many people across the world in the history of humanity have fled from a capitalist country to a socialist one? There was much amusement at the height of the long miners’ strike of 1984/85. A National Union of Mineworkers official from Yorkshire, a crony of Marxist trade unionist Arthur Scargill, sought sanctuary in the […]
From Korea to Germany, experiments with socialism show markets always win
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A red-hot topic in economics is randomised controlled trials (RCT). Esther Duflo, the MIT academic who has really driven this idea, has surely put herself in pole position for a Nobel Prize at some point. The idea of RCTs has been imported from medicine. One group of people are selected at random to be subject […]