{"id":60917,"date":"2026-10-05T01:00:34","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T05:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=60917"},"modified":"2026-10-04T09:53:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-04T13:53:12","slug":"qotd-socialism-and-the-world-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/qotd-socialism-and-the-world-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Socialism and the world wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>What gave socialism a shot was that the hypertrophic nationalism of the first half of the twentieth century plunged the world into not just one but two world wars. Without these catastrophes, it is inconceivable that so many devotees of Marx would have come to power in the seventy years after 1917. The world wars made the case for socialism in multiple ways. First, they seemed to confirm the destructive tendencies of “imperialism, the highest form of capitalism”, in Vladimir Lenin’s words. Second, they greatly expanded the role of the state, which became the principal purchaser of goods and services in most combatant countries, creating precisely the kind of state-controlled economy that socialist theory claimed would perform better than free markets. Third, the wars acted as a great leveler, imposing very high marginal rates of taxation, wage controls, and price controls in ways that tended to reduce wealth and income disparities. Fourth, in 1917 the German government financed the Bolshevik coup in Russia that brought Lenin to power.<\/p>\n

The tragedy was that those who promised utopia generally delivered hell on earth. According to the estimates in the Black Book of Communism<\/em>, the “grand total of victims of Communism was between 85 and 100 million” for the twentieth century as a whole. The lowest estimate for the total number of Soviet citizens who lost their lives as a direct result of Stalin’s policies was more than 20 million, a quarter of them in the years after World War II. Mao alone, as Frank Dik\u00f6tter has shown, accounted for tens of millions: two million between 1949 and 1951, another three million by the end of the 1950s, a staggering 45 million in the man-made famine known as the Great Leap Forward, yet more in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution. Even the less bloodthirsty regimes of Eastern Europe killed and imprisoned their citizens on a shocking scale. In the Soviet Union, 2.75 million people were in the Gulag at Stalin’s death. The numbers were greatly reduced thereafter, but until the very end of the Soviet system its inhabitants lived in the knowledge that there was nothing but their own guile to protect them from an arbitrary and corrupt state. Other communist regimes around the world, including the very durable dictatorships in North Korea and Cuba, were strikingly similar in the miseries they inflicted on their own citizens.<\/p>\n

The various socialist regimes could not even justify their murderous behavior by providing those they spared with higher living standards than their counterparts living under capitalism. On the contrary, they were economically disastrous. The collectivization of agriculture invariably reduced farming productivity. A substantial proportion of the victims of communism lost their lives because of the famines that resulted from collectivization in the Soviet Union and China. North Korea had a similarly disastrous experience. Central planning was a miserable failure for reasons long ago identified by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Janos Kornai, amongst others. Indeed, the economic performance of strictly socialist countries got worse over time because of rigidities and perverse incentives institutionalized by planning. <\/p>\n

Moreover, the evidence is clear that, as countries moved away from socialist policies of state ownership and toward a greater reliance on market forces, they did better economically. The most striking example \u2014 but one of many \u2014 is that of China, which achieved a true great leap forward in economic output after beginning to dismantle restrictions on private initiative in 1978. After the collapse of “real existing socialism” in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was widespread recognition (the “Washington consensus”) that all countries would benefit from reducing state ownership of the economy through privatization and from lowering marginal tax rates. […] the highest marginal personal income tax rate was reduced in nearly all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries between the mid-1970s and mid-2000s.<\/p>\n

Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What gave socialism a shot was that the hypertrophic nationalism of the first half of the twentieth century plunged the world into not just one but two world wars. Without these catastrophes, it is inconceivable that so many devotees of Marx would have come to power in the seventy years after 1917. The world wars […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[22,25,84,7,41,1119,246,230],"tags":[712,1108,1200,76,433,1165],"class_list":["post-60917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-economics","category-government","category-history","category-quotations","category-russia","category-ww1","category-ww2","tag-centralplanning","tag-lenin","tag-maozedong","tag-socialism","tag-sovietunion","tag-stalin"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-fQx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60917"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105180,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60917\/revisions\/105180"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}