And we obediently clasp such fateful declarations to our bosom without so much as an afterthought. Witness the all-encompassing collapse of socialist principles in the USSR and Eastern Europe as viable means of societal organization. During the past 80 years, every nation in the civilized world, that has adopted either socialism or welfarism as its form of political-economic organization, has incurred deterioration and chaos in every conceivable area of life. Inflation has plagued their economies, distorting their marketplaces and eroding the value of their currencies. Real prosperity has diminished.
True freedom is gone.
Joy and exuberance and the zest that life should hold for all is non-existent. In the more primitive parts of the Third World, the record is even worse. Barbarism and tyranny, of a sort that Americans can scarcely fathom, are commonplace. As predicted long ago by Ludwig von Mises, socialist systems cannot calculate prices because they obliterate the entrepreneur, and thus they have no means to rationally determine supply and demand. Thus they have no power to produce either a quantity or quality of productive goods.