President Donald Trump is given to hyperbole. According to him, everything is either the verybest or the veryworst. Most Americans have therefore taken to swallowing his words with a grain of salt. In their heads, they lower the intensity to make room for real world complications.
As a consequence, many of us don’t take seriously his rhetoric about a socialist United States becoming like Venezuela. How could that possibly happen? We are so much richer and more powerful than this puny neighbor we could never experience a correspondingly drastic economic or social decline.
In fact, such a collapse is not out of the question. Other nations have endured huge and unexpected setbacks. They have gone from being world leaders to also-rans in the blink of an eye. While there are countless reasons for this sort of deterioration, adopting socialism ranks in the upper tier.
Consider Great Britain. For over a century, it was the world’s largest industrial power. Then, at the conclusion of World War II, the English people decided they deserved a reward for standing up to Hitler. As a result, they voted Winston Churchill out and the Labor party leader Clement Atlee in.
Atlee and his colleagues were true believers. They immediately began to nationalize industries such as coal and steel. The also created a nationalized medical system. All of this was intended to share the wealth. Prosperous capitalists and aristocrats would not be allowed to flourish at the expense of the little guy.
What ultimately happened, however, is that everyone suffered. The marketplace stagnated, such that price controls remained in effect for many years thereafter. Worse still, England’s gross national product fell behind that of Italy. Everyone became poorer and less optimistic.
Think too of Cuba, or Ghana, or North Korea, or the Eastern European nations that succumbed to the Soviet yoke. Each of them did significantly less well under socialist regimes. This was even true of Russia, which actually grew more slowly under the communists than the Tsars.
Even so, if the U.S. falls into a fatal decline, it will probably not be in the same manner as the U.K. or Romania, or Venezuela. Nationalization of anything more than medicine does not seem to be on our horizon. Nor is a foreign superpower about invade and loot our economy.
No, we will probably destroy the free marketplace in more genteel style. Most likely we will strangle it to death with a surfeit of regulations. Washington bureaucrats will not take direct ownership of companies, but so completely dominate their operations that what businesses do, and how they do it, will be determined by these outsiders.
Thus, farms will not literally be collectivized. Nevertheless, individuals without local knowledge, or a desire to maximize profits, will decide what they produce. Political considerations, not market demands, will likely guide their decisions. If so, costs will go up, while efficiency will go down.
This might sound farfetched; nonetheless it is what happened to Britain’s coalmines. It is also what happened to Venezuela’s oil wells. For that matter, it’s what happened on Cuba’s sugar plantations. Socialist direction was supposed to rationalize production and distribution, whereas it did neither.
Reflect, therefore, upon the impact of total EPA control on American agriculture. How long would it be before we had more mouths to feed than grain with which to feed them? Would food riots ensue? Would manufacturing slowdowns also occur as workers protested being paid in dollars that could not buy bread?
Let us not forget that the current chaos in Venezuela began slowly. Workers who expected dividends from supporting a socialist administration did not initially believe the government was responsible for inflation or food shortages. Their frustrated street riots and the resultant military repression came later.
Imagine this scenario translated into the United States. We are ten times the size of Venezuela with more than ten times the potential for violence. If anarchy ever overtakes our cities and towns, the death toll could be colossal. We are not talking about people shouting at one another, but resorting to lethal weapons.
Liberals want to experiment with new forms of social control, but if these measures are totalitarian in nature and inefficient in operation, a terrible genie might be let loose. They had best be careful what they demand, considering how catastrophic the downside could be.
Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University
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