Opinion Editorial – "Socialism: The Theory That Always Fails in Reality"

Polish West Slavia
Polish West Slavia
Political Science 101 (or something like that idk)
16 May 2025

Firstly, economic centralization destroys the liberty of choice for each and every person. The great thing about capitalism is that everyone gets to pick how they contribute to society. With socialist policies, however, the personal liberty of choice is lost, and it almost forces the people to become dependent on the state in order to survive. Founding father Adam Smith once said, “There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people,” which exemplifies the understanding that governments, regardless of ideology, tend to extract wealth from the people. Socialism is the biggest example of the state taking the wealth of the people for its own purposes, which undermines their economic freedom. It is the moral foundation of capitalism that allows people to decide the inner workings of the economy for the betterment of everyone. Capitalism takes that natural greed within humans and uses it to force improvement and innovation, while proponents of socialism fail to acknowledge that greed will almost always corrupt even the most good-intentioned people.

What follows the loss of personal freedom in the economy is the inefficiency and failures of a centralized government. The greatest example of these failures is the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, with combined issues of bureaucratic corruption, the misallocation of resources caused by the lack of local control, the prioritization of the military over the economy as a whole, and the critical inability to adapt to consumer needs. Probably the most influential failure in ruining the Soviet Union was the massive disconnect between the Soviet leadership and the common people. People in high political positions lived completely different lives from the rest of the population, and these were the people who made decisions for the entire nation. The only way centralized economic planning can work is if it’s controlled by people who understand what their citizens want. It should be understood that even if someone like that comes into power, there is a much more likely chance that the power corrupts the individual, and they work for selfish interests instead.

Why is it that socialism destroys the rights of the common people? The answer: socialism nearly always turns into an authoritarian state that favors loyalty over ability. When a government is given ultimate power over an economy, it becomes an economy without proper supervision, and the people in charge start to favor policies that keep them in power over policies that work to improve the economy. This idea is a bit hard to justify, considering it’s based on the assumption of what humans would do if they had that level of power and control. What needs to be realized is that no human is perfect, and given enough time, someone will come around and ruin it for everyone. This shift into a corrupt government leads us into an authoritarian state, which by beginning with economic policy, will eventually shift into mass censorship and suppression of personal freedoms. The People’s Republic of China is the greatest example of socialism turning into a totalitarian regime, because whichever way you choose to look at China, both totalitarianism and socialism have complete economic control within the central government.

One of the main points behind socialism is that the wealth of the people is equal among all. It’s a moral idea to believe in a world where everyone can enjoy the same standards of living. In every case, though, it fails to come to fruition when socialism is implemented. While each of the economic classes are destroyed in name, the disparity between certain groups remains. Even if it’s attempted, the disparity will always remain simply because centralized planning won’t know how to properly divvy out resources to the factories or the people. Another aspect to consider is that while economic classes based on wealth might be more limited, the alternative that socialism brings with it is much worse. A socialist one-party system favors those who support the party, which creates wealth and therefore upper-class citizens for those loyal to the party. This form of hierarchy is much more oppressive than a simple hierarchy based on economic status because it limits the political and personal freedoms of the people. Think of it like this: if you support the party in a socialist system, you’ll be fine. But what about the people who don’t agree? Are they left to their own devices? People are going to be incentivised to support the one-party system simply because it’ll benefit them economically. The distribution of wealth in socialist systems only changes from a person’s economic output to depending on their loyalty toward the party.

A key factor in how world economies grow over time is the innovation of new products, machines, or other problem-solvers. These innovations are driven in capitalist systems by the economic reward that follows creating such an invention. What socialist ideology fails to grasp is that if every person were to gain around the same amount of pay, regardless of the work that’s put in, where’s the incentive for someone to want to work hard at all? On a bigger scale, when each job type pays the same, jobs with a higher demand will see less and less people coming into that workforce, for the same principle: lack of incentive. With this lack of incentive comes economic stagnation and continuing inefficiency, because nobody wants to improve their work. What difference would it make if someone tried harder? The reason capitalism works while socialism doesn’t is simply that capitalist ideology uses our imperfections as a tool to drive innovation, while socialist ideology expects humans to grow beyond them. This is yet another example of socialism being a moral idea to have, but mistaken in how human nature operates.

The last major part about socialism is how even the most basic rights are taken from the people. Socialist states, because of their desire for control, will take away the freedom of choice from their citizens. Freedom of religion is lost in favor of state atheism, so the state is seen as the highest authority instead of a supernatural being. Freedom of expression is removed in order to protect the socialist system. Freedom of movement is lost, so nobody can escape, especially in the case of East Germany. Socialist governments also keep a close eye on their citizens, sacrificing their right to privacy and even what they’re allowed to think, in order to control the people for their own benefit. Many examples of this can be found from the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the Democratic Kampuchea, which is better known as the Khmer Rouge. In each of these regimes, the government has repressed the rights of the people in favor of political domination.

When you take into account the many attempts to create a socialist state in history, socialism as an ideology proves to be unable to create a fair and equal society. In the search for equality and economic liberation, socialism consistently forges new forms of hierarchy and fewer freedoms for the people. Economic ideologies should not be judged based on their ability to work in a perfect world, simply because humans will never be perfect. The only way we can accurately understand an ideology’s effectiveness is to see how it functions in our world. The reason capitalism works today isn’t because of what it is, but because we’ve adapted the structure in an effort to balance economic freedom with a fair and just society. Socialism might attempt to form a fair and just society, but what good is equality if it comes at the cost of personal liberty and ambition?