Incredibly, amazingly, the grotesque specter of socialism has reared its malignant head in order to threaten once again the prosperity, future, and dignity of tens of millions of Americans. Why is it incredible? The answer is simple. Socialism has never "worked" anywhere it has been tried, if by "working" you mean increasing the prosperity of the country adopting socialist policies.
Socialism has been an unmitigated catastrophe economically in every country in which it has been implemented. The beleaguered, long-suffering island of Cuba is but one classic example. Fidel Castro promised a socialist paradise and delivered a dark nightmare of economic deprivation and denial of human rights. Perhaps the most vivid example for me personally is the United Kingdom. Great Britain built the greatest economic empire the world had ever seen.
In 1900 the British had an empire "on which the sun never set." While it is true that by the dawn of the 20th century the British were being outperformed economically, both by the U.S. and Imperial Germany, Britain was still a country that most of the world envied economically. Unfortunately, the British suffered economically from the terrible losses incurred in World War I and World War II.
Still, in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, the British still possessed an economy that had produced more armaments and war material than anyone except the U.S. Then, in the wake of the deprivations incurred in defeating Germany, the British people, seduced by the false promises of socialism, rejected Winston Churchill as their Prime Minister in favor of the socialist Clement Attlee. Thus began Great Britain's precipitous decline.
Winston Churchill himself, always a master of the spoken word, summed up socialism in remarkably few words: