The Case Against Socialism by Rand Paul (PDF)

Description

A recent poll showed 43% of Americans think more socialism would be a good thing. What do these people not know? Socialism has killed millions, but it’s now the ideology du jour on American college campuses and among many leftists. Reintroduced by leaders such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the ideology manifests itself in starry-eyed calls for free-spending policies like Medicare-for-all and student loan forgiveness. In The Case Against Socialism, Rand Paul outlines the history of socialism, from Stalin’s gulags to the current famine in Venezuela. He tackles common misconceptions about the “utopia” of socialist Europe. As it turns out, Scandinavian countries love capitalism as much as Americans, and have, for decades, been cutting back on the things Bernie loves the most.Socialism’s return is only possible because many Americans have forgotten the true dangers of the twentieth-century’s deadliest ideology. Paul reveals the devastating truth: for every college student sporting a Che Guevara T-shirt, there’s a Venezuelan child dying of starvation. Desperate refugees flee communist Cuba to escape oppressive censorship, rationed food and squalid hospitals, not “free” healthcare. Socialist dictatorships like the People’s Republic of China crush freedom of speech and run massive surveillance states while masquerading as enlightened modern nations. Far from providing economic freedom, socialist governments enslave their citizens. They offer illusory promises of safety and equality while restricting personal liberty, tightening state power, sapping human enterprise and making citizens dependent on the dole.If socialism takes hold in America, it will imperil the fate of the world’s freest nation, unleashing a plague of oppressive government control. The Case Against Socialism is a timely response to that threat and a call to action against the forces menacing American liberty.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “You wouldn’t think a book like this would be necessary but it is, and thank God we have it. Pay special attention to chapter 19, ‘Socialism Becomes Authoritarianism.’ It does, every time.” — Tucker Carlson“Anyone who loves America―our freedom, our Judeo-Christian tradition― must read this book. Thanks to Rand Paul for reminding all of us of the perils of today’s faddish belief that more government control will make us happier.” — Laura Ingraham, Fox News host, The Ingraham Angle“No U.S. senator in the modern era can rival Senator Rand Paul’s fidelity to the first principles of the free market. In this no-holds-barred and fun-to-read broadside, Paul shows why and how he stands alone in defending your right to engage in economic activities free from government intrusion and your constitutional right to a federal government that spends less than it takes. He also demonstrates how everything the central planners touch turns into dust.” — Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, senior judicial analyst, Fox News Channel, and bestselling author“I grew up in China during one of history’s darkest eras: Mao’s socialistic Cultural Revolution. I appreciate the freedom that I have now in America so much because I used to not have it. All Americans need to read The Case Against Socialism, so that we will be reminded just how precious our freedom and our country are.” — Ming Wang, MD, PhD, Nashville, TN“Communists in Russia killed my father. My mother experienced socialism up close and personal. I’ve lived under socialism while working in Cuba and South America. This book explains concisely and historically how state violence and poverty is not an aberration of socialism, but rather its inevitable consequence.” — Jon Basil Utley, publisher, The American Conservative About the Author U.S. Senator Rand Paul, M.D., is one of the nation’s leading advocates for liberty. Elected to the United States Senate in 2010, he has proven to be an outspoken champion for constitutional liberties and fiscal responsibility. Kelley Ashby Paul serves as Kentucky co-chair of Helping A Hero, a wounded veterans charity that has built over 100 fully adapted homes for soldiers who have suffered severe injuries. Kelley also serves on the board for the Coalition for Public Safety, a bipartisan organization dedicated to criminal justice reform. Rand and Kelley have been married since 1990 and are the parents of three sons.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Rand Paul gives his readers many well argued points to contrast the beneficial achievements of capitalism with the repeated failures and perennial menace of socialism. But when not preaching to the choir he argues with a smoke screen. When peering behind the smoke screen it becomes readily evident that no matter how many statistics favoring capitalism anyone cares to throw at leftists, the effort will not so much as dent their faith. They will just yawn, secure in the certainty that the shower of factual and statistical arrows have missed the bull’s-eye. Dr. Paul’s cogent arguments will no doubt fail to convince the very people most in need of convincing. Leftists do not want what they say they want: equality and social justice. They would not be happy with even that outcome. Then what really drives these people?They want the government to run everything and their kind to run the government, a Soviet Union regurgitated onto the United States. Why? … Envy? Enforcing an even playing field out of fear of exposing their inadequacy or irrelevance? Anger over the perceived unfairness of their circumstances? They fall short of the ideal they have imagined for themselves? Hatred of and revenge against an enraging comparison with those who have made good use of their superior ability and ambition?I do not know, but these are reasonable starting suppositions. We cannot get inside another’s head and see what operates therein. Nevertheless only therein can the answers be found.Discussing the causes of our national malaise in terms of economic or political philosophy cannot touch the tap root of a progressive sickness that has nothing to do with economics or politics except efforts to manipulate both.The unparalleled horrors that Dr. Paul describes so poignantly that erupted in China and Cambodia cannot be explained in terms of some political doctrine or a febrile desire to pursue a mirage of equality or what leftists call social justice. These genocides and others like them must be seen as the rage of the psychopathic brain of a thug unchained by an ideology, typically some variant of socialism, that has gained a critical mass of acceptance and scorns the tenets of traditional morality. Socialist idealism gives the thug all the rationalization he needs to pour his murderous hatred over bewildered victims trapped in a madness that, not completely innocent, they helped create.We cannot justly lay all the blame for the many defeats of freedom on the despots who have plagued history preaching some dystopian ideology. We must ask honestly who gave them that power and why. In most cases the answers would require a disturbing admission of complicity.Dr. Paul rightly condemns Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and their ilk, but I would have preferred if he had given at least a bit more attention to how they rose to unchallenged power and even gained the admiration of presumed intellectuals safely removed from the growing malignancy.The single word question that for me rose up throughout this reading is why. Dr. Paul makes an attempt to answer the why question in Chapters 32 and 33 where he tries to dig into the disturbed and conflicted minds that have brought so many catastrophes to our unhappy world.Chapter 36 closes with an incisive insight:“Considering the desire of so many in the climate change industry to silence debate, as well as their antipathy toward capitalism, one has to wonder if there is another motive behind their efforts… Perhaps global redistribution of wealth or a worldwide socialists welfare state?”If Dr. Paul had affirmed that thought as a prevalent undercurrent elsewhere in his book, his shower of arrows would have hit much closer to the bull’s-eye and I would have been overjoyed to give his book six stars if such had been possible.I appeal to all rational conservatives to stop calling leftists “liberals,” “progressives” and “well meaning,” or credit them with superior compassion (with other people’s money). Continuously repeating those unearned descriptors only corroborates leftist delusional self flattery. They are statists. Slap that ignoble label on them and make sure it sticks.The author’s remark near the bottom of page 45 elicited an ironic thought: “Really, political science is ill-suited to prove or disprove sweeping statements that allege that income inequality is destroying democracy. Political science is not a field of mathematics, and twenty experts will give you twenty opinions looking at the same data.”That statement struck me as an excellent argument for not calling politics a science. Political “science” and others pseudo “sciences” (social, religious, economic, etc) steal the hard earned respect accorded to real science that struggles to discover the secrets of reality while having to put up with the oversight of pretentious political types.

⭐Rand Paul makes a compelling case against socialism in general. He cites Venezuela as an example of a socialist failed state. Despite its enormous oil reserves, that country, under Maduro abd Chavez before him, have turned the once prosperous nation into a disaster for its citizens. Its people are starving. For instance, he notes a 16 year old girl leader of a gang that fights other gangs for the opportunity to sift through garbage piles. And young men hunt dogs and cats in the street and pigeons in the plazas for food. The population as a whole has lost an average of 20 pounds of body weight. Venezuelans are fleeing to Colombia to survive.Cuba is cited as another impoverished socialist country and with strong government controls over goods, services, and paychecks. A tough country to live in despite government controlled health care.Rand disputes that the Scandinavian countries are socialist utopias. He asserts that they’re not even socialist, at least not in recent decades. They are capitalist nations and with private ownership of land and of businesses, including factories. By strict definition, a socialist nation is one where the central government owns the means of production. A poignant example is Venezuela, where the government nationalized industries, including the oil industry. But Rand seems to extend that definition to privately owned land and industries that the government doesn’t own but highly regulated. By that standard, all governments are socialistic, at least to some extent, in my opinion. After all, you could say that the government of New York City is socialistic as to landlords, given the rent controls, zoning ordinances, and laws that the landlords are subject to. So Rand and I part company on the definition of socialism.But Scandinavian countries do indeed provide free college and free or at least very cheap medical care. To that extent they’re socialistic. But more accurately they’re welfare states will very high taxes. Earn over $60,000 or so depending on the country and you’re marginal tax rate is about 60 percent. I sure wouldn’t want to live there.The author argues that socialism always involves violence for enforcement. He cites Nazi Germany and Russia as examples. I question his assertion on this. He also notes the totalitarian control, backed by force, of China, with its social credit scores and surveillance of its citizens. Though China is capitalistic economically, it’s politically communistic.Rand strikes me as a climate change denier, though he states the issue is not decided one way or the other and is open to debate. Okay, but then he tries to make a case that global warning isn’t caused by man made greenhouse gasses, like carbon dioxide. He cites the three Milankovitch cycles as being mainly involved with recent warming. Those cycles involves the shape of the Earth’s orbit around the dun, the rotational precession of the Earth on its axis, and the alternating degree of tilt of the Earth from its rotation axis. But he doesn’t mention that these cycles are tens of thousands of years long, from 26,000 to almost 100,000 years. And the operate at random to one another. Furthermore, global warming is happening in a much shorter time period, like over a century. It’s characterized in part by sea level rises and the melting of glaciers and ice caps. The fabled Northwest Passage so sought after by European explorers of bygone centuries is now starting to develop. Eventually it’ll exist year round. And this has nothing to do with Milankoviych cycles. Hello, Rand Paul.Anyway, the book is well worth reading albeit _it the caveats I’ve mentioned

⭐Dr. Paul’s book looks at historic examples of countries that have adopted socialism and the sad results. He discusses the cost to the people’s freedom, their livelihood, and liberty.We cannot afford to ignore the past with sound bites that encourage “fairness” and “universal basic income” by redistribution of wealth determined by those in power. It always comes at the expense of liberty and never ends well.

⭐Love this book. I learned a lot. Easy reading and really makes you think about the harmful effects of socialism. They should use this in all schools to teach the young kids.

⭐Easy comfortable read. Makes point without getting too technical.

⭐The real truth of socialism

⭐Very good; more like this is needed.

⭐This an extremely well written book, a pleasure to read. It is well sourced and argues its case effectively.

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