The Case Against Socialism, by Rand Paul

As someone who has long been fond of the writings of Bastiat and long been familiar with the writings of many of the economists of the Austrian school and their associates, I am certainly familiar with and generally favorable to the body of works that has been highly critical of socialism in all of its flavors. It should come as little surprise that I am fond of this book as well, for although the book in some ways travels very familiar ground in terms of its discussions of the many and fatal flaws of socialism in terms of its assumptions, its demands, and its performance as a structuring aspect of society, the book is also full of what appears to be a certain personal spirit of the author himself, who I am less familiar with than I should be, perhaps. The author weaves a great deal of his own personal background and context as well as those people he knows and their own stories about socialism into his book, and that gives the work a human touch that might be unexpected for such a weighty political treatise. Those readers who are able to accept where the author is coming from and take a long, hard look at the failed record of socialism around the world and the ways in which the socialism we already experience (the crony capitalism and the privileged position of often unaccountable political elites) will understand that socialism cannot work because it does not accept the reality of human nature and the human experience. The denial of reality that socialism requires to be appealing is what prevents it from being either effective or beneficial.

One of the ways this book particularly shines light in an area of contemporary interest is in pointing out that whatever pretensions some politicians may make to being Democratic socialists, the gulag can never be absent in any socialist regimes because of the utopian natures of socialist goals and the obvious nature of the resistance to these goals. Those who desire to enforce a state of equality for others can only create an equality of misery that the leaders of such regimes will desire to escape themselves, which invalidates them as being fit to the angels to direct society according to their aims. Socialism forces a state and its (very human) leaders to attempt the impossible and sets up consistent areas of failure for such regimes. This author just manages to point it out, often in humorous ways. The chapter titles of this book are particularly humorous and invite the reader to subject socialism to ridicule and scorn, which is precisely what socialism deserves.

This book is sizable but not huge at just over 300 pages, and is divided into six parts which cover about 40 chapters or so, give or take. The book begins with a short introduction before part one examines how socialism creates poverty with chapters that discuss the destruction of Venezuela (1), corruption (2), the inevitable response of interfering with markets (3), the morality of capitalism (4), the benefits of capitalism to the middle class (5), the lack of problems of inequality (6), the changing nature of the 1% (7), and how the poor are better off under capitalism (8). The second part of the book contains eight chapters that discuss how it is that capitalism and not socialism is what makes Scandinavia great (II), including some pointed digs at the way that Denmark runs away from being considered socialist in the way that people like Bernie Sanders claim. The third part of the book contains eight chapters that connect socialism inevitably to authoritarianism and the denial of basic human rights, including the fact that Hitler’s regime, far from being capitalist or conservative, was itself socialist. The fourth part of the book then contains six chapters that show how socialism does not create equality at all, especially because socialist leaders exempt themselves from the misery that is enforced on everyone else, as seen time and time again in history. The fifth part of the book then subjects the philosophy of socialism to scorn by pointing out that the angels needed to run it, the supermen of virtue, simply do not exist. The sixth part of the book then closes the discussion by showing how it is that socialism is connected to alarmism, especially that of supposed anthropogenic climate change, and how socialists refuse to let any crisis go to waste in their attempts to ruin life for mankind. The book ends with an afterword that shows the author’s goal of finding common ground in Congress, followed by acknowledgments, notes, and an index.