Communism's Failure

Sometimes I wonder why people still cling to communism. Since its earliest days, it has been disproven over and over and over again.

One of the earliest instances I can think of is with the Jamestown colony. The settlers there set up a “common warehouse” system. Everything that was produced or acquired was distributed equally among all the colonists. Thus, no one was rewarded for hard labor, and no one had any incentive for providing food, because they would be fed anyway. You see the result in the many famines and near-death winter experiences. In spite of the failure, this method was tried with many other colonies in the 1600s as well. Communism doesn’t work well.

A few more examples can be seen with the many experimental settlements in the mid-1800s. These attempts were largely communistic in nature, and likewise failed. You always hear these stories about so-and-so founding a communal village somewhere, and it failing soon after beginning. Communism doesn’t work well.

Then you come to the BIG experiments of the 20^th century starting with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. The czars were overthrown, and the U.S.S.R. was founded. This big experiment also deteriorated and rotted until its collapse in 1991, being unable to compete with the free United States under Reagan. Communism doesn’t work well.

China was also overcome by communism, and continues to this day as a communist state. China; however, is an odd case. When Mao Zedong instituted the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, things didn’t go so well. Deng, his successor, had to send students to Western universities to learn how to clean up the mess. After the 1989 event, the Chinese were given more economic freedoms, and China ceased to be communistic. Today China is a convoluted form of a capitalistic state with a dictatorship. Communism doesn’t work well.

The only true communistic states out there today are North Korea and Cuba. Even those aren’t so much communist as t dictatorships. They’re not that successful either. The “worker’s paradise” is a delusion that has never been achieved.

With all these failures, you would think that people would give up on communism, but they still cling to it like an infant to his blanket.