I saw this when I went into East Germany, the state economy couldn't provide for its citizens and they stood in line for everything, unless you were associated with the party, then you shopped in the special stores where you had access to everything. It was the same in every communist country. The elites had plenty, the proles had the leftovers....Funny that, there is a quote" Socialism/Communism is for the people, not the socialist/communist. Basically the rules are for you not them, you will ride the bus...if it run...you will pick through the store looking for something to feed your family, not them...you will wear nondescript clothing...not them because you are the unnamed masses....not the communist/socialist who pushed the system on you. They will live well, on your labor...not you. But hey ain't socialism/communism grand? It steals your soul, it steals your hope until you became the walking automaton hoping for death to take you, hoping for something better on the other side because you are living in misery here, but hey ain't the party slogans great! "The great Utopia will soon be here, keep working comrades"...but the slogans don't change over generations but the people do...and hope fades away as the older generation sees the slavery that they live under and that their kids are born under and that there is no hope for them. Until the wall suddenly falls away.......in 1989 when the people finally had enough and the government was powerless to stop the rage and the people realized that the government was toothless even when the apparatus of security, the Army supported the citizens....not the government. And November 1989 became a reality.
I blogged a lot about "Berlin" and "East Germany", I was stationed in West Germany from 1986 to 1991, I was there when President Reagan gave his famous speech in 1987 telling Mr Gorbechov" To tear down This Wall". I was there in 1989 when the wall came down and the "Trabbi's" crossed over. It was kinda surreal, I almost expected Ron Sterling to appear.
I clipped this from "The Templar Mind"
The Free Market Isn't Greed. It's Service.
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Capitalism is built on greed. Socialism is built on need.
You've heard this. You've probably repeated it. It sounds right.
It isn't though. It's actually the opposite.
Walk into any small town in America. Count the businesses on Main Street. The diner. The hardware store. The mechanic. The dentist. Every one of them exists because somebody bet their livelihood on solving your problem.
The owner of the diner doesn't cook for himself. He cooks for you. The mechanic doesn't fix his own truck all day. He fixes yours. If they serve you well, they prosper. If they don't, the place closes and something better takes its spot.
That's the free market. Not greed. Service.
Nobody starts a business for themselves. They start a business for you.
St. John Chrysostom understood this fifteen centuries before Adam Smith.
In his homilies on 1 Corinthians and Ephesians, he taught that the skill of the craftsman is given not for himself alone but for the sake of others.
God distributes gifts unevenly so that we depend on one another. The cobbler needs the farmer. The farmer needs the blacksmith.
This isn't a theory. I've watched it happen in real time. I spent a decade running a residential construction company in Colorado and Texas. When a contractor in Dallas bids on a kitchen remodel and quotes it too high or cuts corners, the homeowner leaves a one-star review and his phone stops ringing.
Meanwhile, the contractor across town who shows up on time, stays on budget, and does clean work? That guy gets referral after referral.
Nobody forces this outcome. No agency intervenes. The market punishes laziness and rewards excellence all on its own.
Every small business owner in America lives under this discipline. Serve the customer or lose the customer. Adapt or die. The consumer doesn't have to ask for permission. He just goes somewhere else.
The consumer holds all the power. You vote with every dollar. Every transaction is a verdict.
In a socialist economy, the government holds the power. A handful of planners decide what you need, how much of it should exist, and what you'll pay. Millions of individual decisions get replaced by a committee. And committees always get it wrong.
No central planner possesses the knowledge that millions of free actors generate through daily exchange. Hayek called it the knowledge problem. The Fathers called it something older.
The belief that a few minds can substitute for the wisdom distributed across an entire people.
Have you noticed that late-stage socialist states always run out of the basics? The shelves go empty. They always do.
Not because of sanctions or bad luck. Because the system is structurally incapable of responding to human need. It can only respond to power. And power concentrates.
Those with connections get what they want.
Everyone else gets a line to stand in.
Venezuela is the most recent example of this. Once among the wealthiest countries in South America. From the 1950s through the early 1980s, oil revenue made it the continent's economic powerhouse.
But the prosperity was already eroding before Chávez. By 1998, per capita GDP had fallen to its 1963 level, down a third from its 1978 peak.
Half the country lived in poverty. The foundation was cracking before the socialists ever took the stage.
Then they finished the job.
Hugo Chávez nationalized industries, imposed price controls, and gutted the institutions that kept the economy running. His successor Maduro accelerated the collapse. Leftist activists in the West celebrated Venezuela as the new model of modern socialism.
Right up until people started eating zoo animals.
But what about Western Europe? Aren't those socialist countries? Free healthcare. Free college. Strong unions.
No. There are no socialist countries in Western Europe. Denmark, Sweden, Norway. They're capitalist economies with large welfare states. There's a difference. A big one.
In 2015, Denmark's prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen corrected this directly at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy, he said. Denmark is a market economy.
Not a planned socialist economy.
When you point to Scandinavia as proof that socialism works, you're actually proving that capitalism works. Because only a free market generates the wealth necessary to fund the programs those countries offer.
Without the engine of free enterprise, there's nothing to redistribute. Without capitalism, you don't get Scandinavia. You get Caracas.
St. Basil the Great taught that wealth itself is not the evil. The evil is hoarding it. "The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry," he preached. But notice the order. First you bake the bread. Then you share it. Socialism skips the first step and wonders why the cupboard is bare.
More capitalism means less dependency. Look at the American economy from 2010 to 2019. Over nearly a decade of sustained job growth, unemployment fell steadily across every demographic. By 2019, unemployment had reached historic lows.
Lower taxes and reduced regulation after 2017 contributed significantly, but the broader trajectory was driven by a labor market that kept expanding because the underlying engine was free enterprise.
People moved off welfare and into work. Not because one president or another planned it.
Because the market rewarded it.
I grew up in the '90s, and back then this didn't require an economics degree to understand. It was just common sense. Yet today, young people praise socialism and condemn the system that creates their jobs, their wages, and their freedom.
They're working against their own interests. Worse, they're working against the interests of the poor they claim to champion.
Capitalism isn't perfect. No human system is. But it aligns self-interest with service. It channels the craftsman's skill toward the neighbor's need. It does what Chrysostom described. It makes human interdependence productive rather than coercive.
Every Marxist-Leninist state that has attempted a command economy has delivered tyranny. The Soviet Union. Maoist China. Cambodia. Cuba. Venezuela.
The pattern holds without exception.
The further a state drifts from free exchange and toward centralized control, the closer it moves toward coercion. The free market isn't just an economic system. It's a moral guardrail. Remove it, and power has no check but itself.
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