Today’s apologists for socialism still won’t acknowledge the lessons of the Berlin Wall
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
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
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
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 […]
