Russia is perhaps the most richly endowed land in the world in terms of natural resources. Yet the Leftist promoters of economic equality and social justice in Communist Russia failed to produce a standard of living that rivaled capitalist countries. Countries with few natural resources, such as Japan and Switzerland, would have standards of living well beyond the poverty created by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. As David Horowitz pointed out in The Politics of Bad Faith “the Soviet Union’s per capita income is estimated by Soviet economists as about one-seventh that of the United States, more or less on a par with Communist China. In the Soviet Union in 1989, there was rationing of meat and sugar, in peacetime. The rations revealed that the average intake of red meat for a Soviet citizen was half of what it had been for a subject of the czar in 1913. At the same time, a vast supermarket of fruits, vegetables and household goods, available to the most humble inhabitant of a capitalist economy, was permanently out of reach for the people of the socialist state. Indeed, one of the principal demands of a Siberian miners’ strike in 1989 was for an item as mundane and basic to a sense of personal well-being as a bar of soap. In a land of expansive virgin forests, there was a toilet paper shortage.”
The same squandering of vast natural resources by leftist politicians can be seen in Venezuela’s descent into poverty under Hugo’s Chavez’s Socialism of the 21st century. Venezuela has some of the largest oil reserves in the world, yet economic progressives have found a way to squander this wealth too. There is no limit to the destructive capacity of Marxists once they are given power by people who gullibly believe the ideals they proclaim. Those who think taxation and regulation will not ruin even the wealthiest economy in the world are clueless as to the destructive capacity of Marxist assumptions. Read The Communist Manifesto below and ask yourself if any of it sounds familiar.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State
- Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto
See The Politics of Bad Faith by David Horowitz
Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell
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