I cannot thank Garland Tucker III and Jon Pritchett enough for their recent Carolina Journal column on “Freedom is only one generation away from extinction.”

The title takes its cue from a quotation from Ronald Reagan. Tucker and Pritchett explore the wisdom of Locke, Smith, Thatcher, and others to explain why human liberty from intrusive government is so important. It is a fashion these days to affect fondness for socialism and be hypervigilant against Naziism as if those were not two different sides of the same oppressive coin — the intrusive government that strictly limits human liberty for a supposed “common good.”

The only effective “anti-fascist” is the one who promotes individual liberty, which necessarily includes free-market capitalism. Otherwise, you are essentially arguing how best to boil the frog.

Tucker and Pritchett write:

The 20th century is littered with the failures of socialism. Millions have been either thrust into poverty or held captive to poverty by socialistic governments. As economist Thomas Sowell wrote, “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.” China, Russia, Zimbabwe, India, Argentina, etc., have all flirted with socialism with uniformly disastrous results. The latest economic disaster is Venezuela. President Trump’s analysis is right on the mark: “The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented.”

But do young people understand what Trump is saying?

I have always found this explanation of the difference between socialist governance and free-market capitalism to be compelling. Who has to wait?

In a free market, sellers compete with each other to bring things to the buying public. We get a range of choices at a range of prices, and the effect of competition brings about progressively better products and progressively lower prices. Goods wait for people.

In a socialist system, the government removes competition entirely and determines who needs what and restricts who can sell and for what price. Even at its best (i.e., if you set aside the corruption it would quickly encourage), this system removes incentives to produce, to raise quality, to provide goods we would consider “marketable,” to do anything other than the bare minimum. People wait for goods.

Venezuela was not too long ago hailed by our nation’s elite socialists as the ideal. Here is where that ideal has led, because it was bound to: