User blog comment:Centrist16/SOMETHING EVERYONE MUST KNOW/@comment-3398633-20150809140026/@comment-3398633-20150813205436

All economic systems have caused some form of death and misery, but none more destructive than socialism. It has a known history of failing time and time again, and causing countless deaths. Capitalism has had its moments, but you rarely see people dying routinuely because of it. Socialism has models, policies, goals. Capitalism does not. Socialism can be summed up as "the greatest inequality is the equal treatment of unequals". A manager and a worker are not equal. Socialism tries to force them to be equal when it is an impossibility. Socialism, in attempting to create an equal workplace, ultimately creates yet another class system within it.

Look at the Nordic states. They all have capitalist economic systems, yet the people routinuely report being happy with their current state of affairs on an annual basis. You don't see any of the Scandinavians clamouring for socialism because they don't want or need it. Only in poor countries where the people don't know a thing about handling money, do you see socialism take root. The Zapatistas are harrassed by the Mexican government because the Mexican people don't like them. I don't know if you knew this, but the socialist revolutions in Latin America throughout the Cold War left a pretty nasty taste in the mouths of the local population. They know the deal and they aren't buying into it.

Now on Einstein, he was a phsyicist, not an economist. He could talk a big game about capitalism, but he didn't know how the economies of the world operated like a person who actually studied it in university. As for the others, you've mentioned a painter, an activist, an author, a mathematician, another activist, a reverend, and a politician under whom South Africa's unemployment rate skyrocketed, but not a single economist. Just face it TM, no economist worth his or her salt is going to support a socialist economic system, especially since it has a long history of failing, not once, not twice, not three times or even four times.

There have been thirty-two socialist states to date, and only four remain because the other twenty-eight either collapsed under their own weight, or wised up and adopted capitalism as their means of economic survival. Socialism has such a poor track record that it isn't even funny to laugh at it. No economist, past, present, or future, will ever support a system with that poor of a history over an entire century of human history. There are plenty of models of socialism, but most of them have have failed. Like the other horrible ideas of humanity, we like to leave them in the past to be forgotten.