Socialism Flops Again--And Maintains Its Perfect Record

Socialism Flops Again—And Maintains Its Perfect Record 

By Lawrence W. Reed

What a difference 20 years can make!

In December 2005, socialist Evo Morales emerged victorious as Bolivia’s new president-elect. At a rally of supporters in Cochabamba, he declared, “Beginning tomorrow, Bolivia’s new history really begins: A history where we will seek equality, justice, equity, peace and social justice.”

A funny thing happened on the way to the workers’ paradise.

Morales taxed, spent, regulated and nationalized. Buoyed at first by rising worldwide commodity prices, he appeared he might become the first demagogue since the Big Bang to make socialism work. Then commodity prices plunged, and the chickens came home to roost. The state power that socialists like Morales worship proved addictive and toxic. He employed every dirty trick in the book to defy the country’s term limits. Amid electoral fraud, a sinking economy, and widespread protests, he fled the country in 2019, but his Movement for Socialism (MAS) political party clung to power in the person of Luis Arce, the current president who opted not to run again in this past Sunday’s elections.

Morales bitched and moaned on the sidelines, urging voters to boycott the August 17 balloting. Instead, those voters delivered an historic rebuke on a massive scale. They blamed Morales, Arce and their pompous promises for the country’s soaring inflation and worsening economic crisis.

MAS was all but wiped out at the ballot box on Sunday. Its presidential candidate received a paltry 3.1 percent of the vote, just a tenth of a percent above the threshold a party needs under the law to avoid mandatory dissolution. That’s more than a 50-point drop since the Morales win in 2005. Presently, it appears that MAS will hold no seats in either the lower house (the Chamber of Deputies) or the Senate. After final-round voting decides the ultimate winner in October, Bolivia will have a non-socialist president.

Some members from other parties in the Legislative Assembly lean socialist but they may want to think twice since they won’t have any MAS colleagues to make them appear moderate. Or they can just move to New York City and help Zohran Mamdani destroy the Big Apple if he wins in November.

My old friend Wilboor Brun, president of the Bolivian free market think tank, the Centro de Estudios Publicos (POPULI), is optimistic but cautious at the same time. He emailed me yesterday, pointing out that “We still face significant challenges in explaining why this crisis emerged and how Bolivia can move toward a path of sustainable development and prosperity.” Though both candidates in the October run-off oppose the socialism of Morales and MAS, their platforms so far stop short of what the nation really needs, namely, a Bolivian version of Argentina’s Javier Milei. (I recently suggested what the next president should tell the people here.)

Argentina tried “moderation” when it elected Mauricio Macri its president in 2015. The lesson from his four forgettable years is that milquetoast anti-socialism is a waste of time. Milei’s first 18 months, by contrast, has been bold and successful. In fighting socialism, the chain saw is far more effective than the butter knife.

In rejecting socialism, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises offered timeless advice that expresses the stark choice people and countries face:

A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

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(Lawrence W. Reed is President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty at the Foundation for Economic Education in Atlanta, Georgia. He blogs at www.lawrencewreed.com.)