- The Cost Of Socialism

This is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For those of you too young to remember, that event even more than the collapse of the soviet government, was the moment we won the cold war.

But now, among the young in this country, the sins of totalitarian socialism have all become 'theoretical'. They forget that real lives were effected and runied by central planning. So I offer this clip from the brilliant German movie "The Lives Of Others", about life in East German just before the wall fell.



What you don't see here is that the young man was consigned to purgatory for that joke. He appears much later in the movie sorting cards in a windowless basement, not quite in prison but all but. His life was destroyed because he made a joke in front of someone who had the political power to harm his career. And what's much worse is that I'm quite sure Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel look at the Stazi officer who did it to him with envy.

Socialism is a bad idea. It's always been a bad idea. It's not 'different this time"... it never is. And it's a little ironic that most of the cost of socialism, is actually social.