Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo’s new book, The Problem With Socialism, hardly could have come at a better time; the socialist fever is riding high in the United States, with demagogues like Vermont senator Bernie Sanders selling the idea that ancient, discredited economic philosophies are somehow the wave of the future, while simultaneously telling people that the failed government economic planning that has dominated most of our lifetimes is somehow a function of "capitalism." Those of us who value the truth are always in need of new weapons in our arsenal, and this book is a valuable addition.
The Problem With Socialism is a short book, clearly designed for a popular and not a scholarly audience — if you’re looking for a deep philosophical disquisition about the flaws and failures inherent in socialism, Ludwig von Mises’ 1922 classic Socialism remains the gold standard in the field. The Mises book, of course, is six hundred pages long and dense in the way that only German philosophy can be, and requires days if not weeks of study to comprehend, making it unsuitable for people who want a quick introduction to the field, or for giving to one’s friends or children who have become "socialism-curious;" they’ll simply never read it. DiLorenzo’s book, on the other hand, is admirably suited to the task, fluidly written, easily readable in one setting and accessible enough that even a socialist could understand it.
The format of the book reminds me of nothing so much as Henry Hazlitt’s classic Economics in One Lesson — much like the Hazlitt work, DiLorenzo opens up with a short theoretical discussion, and proceeds to elaborate that theory in the remainder of the book, each chapter dealing with a specific type of real-world failure. The chapters are short and punchy, each filled with constant examples of how socialism has failed even on its own terms; one chapter deals with how the welfare state breeds more, rather than less, poverty, while another deals with the way minimum wage laws create a permanent unemployable underclass, quite the opposite of advancing the alleged "equality" they’re meant to fight.
The strongest section of the book, to my mind, is the chapter entitled "How Socialism Causes Pollution." In modern America the socialist movement is so deeply in bed with the environmentalists that it’s almost taken entirely for granted that socialism would lead to an ecological wonderland, so DiLorenzo’s vivid depiction of the way the worst environmental disasters in history all, without exception, occurred under socialist regimes is a marvelous antidote. Indeed, those of us spoiled by life in the largely-capitalist United States can’t even begin to comprehend the real situation; we see cigarette butts and soda cans littered on the side of the road and assume that’s an environmental disaster caused by capitalism, but we’ve never endured the insanity of entire forests dying out because of air pollution. This, as DiLoreno describes, was nonetheless the situation in several of the former "communist bloc" nations. Can you even imagine the air being so filthy that forests die? The free market could never sustain such a situation, but socialism created it multiple times.
While there are no new theoretical insights in this work that libertarians who’ve made a study of the issue won’t be aware of, there is quite a bit of new data presented that I, at least, was unfamiliar with; I had no idea that the government of California, during the recent drought, was pumping millions of gallons of fresh, potable water into the ocean every day in pursuit of its environmental policy, nor was I aware of the fact that Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo has thousands of gallons of sewage dumped into it every second. These are only a few of the revelations DiLorenzo brings to the table, all of them thoroughly documented and footnoted. There are twenty pages of footnotes here, in a book that otherwise doesn’t quite stretch to two hundred — that’s quite a lot of references!
As said, The Problem With Socialism is a short book, but the page count is deceptive even then, as the book is quite small in dimension, standing only seven inches tall. This makes it quite portable, and easy to slip into a bag or a large pocket; given its portability and the fact that the hardcover edition costs only one dollar more than the Kindle version, this is an economical and accessible tome that can easily be distributed to any prospective socialists you happen to know. John Caruso’s cover illustration, of a smiling, Pinocchio-nosed man, has a sort of quaint, Shel Silverstein-ish mood about it; I myself would be hard-pressed to place an illustration of anything other than a mountain of dead bodies under the title "The Problem With Socialism," but probably that’s just me, and Regnery might have found that a bit macabre for a mass-market publication anyhow.
The book, like everything else, is not without flaw; there are a few typographical errors throughout (though not so many that it seems excessive), and a few minor factual errors, such as when DiLorenzo asserts that "Soviet socialism never produced a single product that succeeded in international competition," when I can think of one major success off the top of my head. Still and all, this doesn’t impact DiLorenzo’s argument; whether the number of successful Soviet products was zero, or one, or a few, the point is the same — it wasn’t so much as a tiny fraction of the production of the United States, a much smaller country. This leads into what may be the book’s only major flaw: it treats socialism largely in terms of its actual economic production, when "serious" socialists have long ago abandoned the pretense that socialist economies could possibly out-produce capitalist economies, choosing to focus instead on the aforementioned alleged environmental benefits of socialism, along with a sort of mystical "spiritual" benefit that socialists have over capitalists, and which DiLorenzo addresses not at all. Still and all, this is probably due to the book’s position as an antidote to popular rather than academic socialism; the college kids cheering for Bernie Sanders’ promises of "free" stuff were supporting socialism for its alleged economic superiority, after all.
The Problem With Socialism is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the question; those of us who’ve made a study of the issue won’t find any new philosophical insights, but we’ll get a bunch of new data wrapped up in a punchy, accessible presentation. Those who are unfamiliar with the question of socialism, however, or who are on the fence about it, may find themselves taking a long, hard look at what their socialist friends are saying, which is a good thing. Hardcore socialists aren’t going to be persuaded, of course, but there was never any hope of that in the first place. For the rest of us, it’s hard to go wrong here for just ten dollars — quite an affordable price for the truth.