The Economics of Socialism

I must preface this with an acknowledgment that I am no easy hand on the matter of economy. It seems a discipline which has only made itself more complex and impenetrable over time, attempting over and over to create mathematics to explain the inexplicability of human behavior, succeeding only in discovering mathematics with the same vagaries of the human psyche. Nonetheless, I must first explore briefly the main theory of economics that dominated the last century of history.

Communism began as a theory, but, in practice, entrusted the public with the responsibility to work for everyone else's welfare, while simultaneously denying them the freedoms that are every man's right and ensuring that they, themselves, did not have sufficient means to eke a living on their own. The foolishness of such a proposition is well obvious.

A near-synonym, among the uneducated, is 'socialism', which, as a derivant of communism, instead trusts control of the economic system to the government. Many accuse our own new president of being socialist, of enacting socialist ideas and setting this country on a socialist path. The word itself evokes horrifying memories of communism and the war that wasn't a war at all but merely the threat of one.

Many accuse our current president of socialist policies, in attempting to throw further nonexistent contents of the government budget at the economic recession. It bewilders me that one half of the country may claim this 'stimulus' is essential to give American businessmen (and women) a fair chance to succeed in the economic climate, and the other half of the country compares the policy itself to an economic system used to enslave and oppress its people. Obviously, one of them must be right; they cannot both be so. However, even the nation's experts seem divided on the matter.

Perhaps it will have no effect at all. It does not matter - each side of the argument may find evidence to support them, regardless of the outcome.