The Only Equity Socialism Ever Delivers

The Only Equity Socialism Ever Delivers

The theory is seductive on paper, abolish private property, put the means of production in the hands of “the people” (meaning the state), and distribute wealth so that no one has too much and no one has too little. A classless society of abundance. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

History’s verdict is in, and it is brutal. Whenever this experiment has been run at scale and for long enough to reach its logical conclusions, the actual outcome is not equality of prosperity. It is equality of impoverishment, with a tiny political elite conspicuously exempted. The theory is not misunderstood; it is a lie that cannot survive contact with human nature and economic reality.

When the state seizes farms, factories, and businesses, the link between effort and reward is severed. The ambitious, the inventive, and the merely diligent discover that extra work benefits only the state. Production collapses. This is not a bug; it is the feature.

Soviet Union: collective farms produced so little grain that Stalin had to import it while millions starved.

Venezuela: oil-rich nation went from Latin America’s richest country to 90 % poverty and hyperinflation in less than twenty years after nationalizations.

North Korea vs South Korea: same people, same resources in 1950; today one side has famine and the other has K-pop and semiconductors.

Central planning fails at the knowledge problem

No bureaucracy can replicate the price signals and dispersed knowledge of millions of free individuals. Shortages become chronic, black markets flourish, and the official economy atrophies.

Cuba still rations beans and chicken decades after the “temporary” ration books were introduced in 1962.

To keep anyone from getting ahead, the state must prohibit private accumulation. Savings, side businesses, even large gardens are treated as threats. The result is not that the poor get rich; it is that the middle class is deliberately pauperized to match the poor.Pol Pot’s Cambodia took this to its logical extreme: evacuate cities, abolish money, send everyone to collective rice fields. Equality achieved—almost everyone starved equally.

When the state is the sole employer, landlord, food distributor, and doctor, dissent becomes suicidal. You do not bite the hand that feeds you when that hand can cut off everything overnight.

East Germany’s Stasi employed one informer for every six citizens. Fear, not ideology, kept the system running.

The promised “dictatorship of the proletariat” instantly becomes dictatorship over the proletariat. Party members, generals, and their families get the dachas, imported cars, Swiss bank accounts, and Western medical care. The masses get slogans.

Fidel Castro died with a personal fortune estimated between $500 million and $900 million.

Nicolás Maduro’s daughter flaunted wealth on Instagram while Venezuelan children ate from garbage trucks.

Kim Jong Un is obese in a country where the average citizen is stunted from chronic malnutrition.

Every country that has abandoned the core socialist model—private ownership banned, prices set by committee, capital flight criminalized—has seen living standards explode almost immediately.

China after Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms: hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty in one generation—by reintroducing markets and property rights.

Vietnam after 1986 Đổi Mới reforms: same story.

Poland, Czech Republic, Estonia after 1989: rapid convergence with Western Europe once the socialist shackles were removed.

The pattern is so consistent that it is no longer debatable. Where socialist policies are fully implemented and maintained, mass poverty is the rule, not the exception.

The Final Equity

Socialism does deliver equity in the end. Not the equity of shared prosperity its apostles promise, but the equity of shared scarcity. Everyone—except the inner circle of the regime—ends up equally poor, equally dependent, and equally powerless.

That is not a side effect. For those who seek total control, it is the entire point.

History has run the experiment dozens of times, on every continent, under every conceivable variation. The result is always the same.

The theory is a lie.

The outcome is the truth.