from Venezuela Reaches the End of the Road to Serfdom by Kevin Williamson at National Review

Weird thing: That feckless and authoritarian kind of socialism is the only kind of socialism anybody has ever seen or heard of outside of a college dorm room. Either socialism is the unluckiest political idea in the history of political ideas and it just happens to have coincided with government by monsters, caudillos, and incompetents every place it has been tried, or there is in fact something wrong with socialism qua socialism.

Why is it that the big-government Danish welfare state, the small-government Swiss welfare state, the frequently illiberal Singaporean welfare state, and the nice-guy Canadian welfare state all seem to work, each in its own way, while socialist experiments — including the so-called democratic-socialist experiments of places such as Venezuela — go speeding down F. A. Hayek’s road to serfdom?

The critical difference is that entrepreneurship and markets are allowed to work in a welfare state — and to work especially well in welfare states characterized by public sectors that, while they may be larger or smaller, are transparent, honest, and effective. The U.S. food-stamp program has its defects, to be sure, but it’s a great deal more effective than was Soviet collective farming and state-run groceries. A dynamic capitalist economy such as Switzerland’s or Singapore’s or Canada’s can carry a lot of welfare state.

But it cannot really carry all that much socialism.

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