Reply To: Why are people against socialism?

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charliehall
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Socialism in its extreme form is inconsistent with Torah. But so is laissez-faire capitalism. Both Karl Marx and Ayn Rand were apostate Jews, and their philosophies were directly driven by a rejection of HaShem’s directions for us. Rand in particular would strongly opposed the torah commandments peah, leket, shich’chah, maaser oni, shmitta, or the rabbinic institutions of kuppa and tamchui, and would have been horrified had she known that Rambam codified as binding halachah that anyone not paying the assessment to the poor that the communal government mandated would face lashes! And both Marx and Trotsky both rejected the Torah’s limited permission for individual private property. (It *is* possible that they both would have been horrified by the crimes against humanity carried out by Stalin and Mao; Trotsky was one of Stalin’s victims.)

More benign forms of socialism, such as in the UK and Israel in the three decades after World War II, actually work quite well. None of the religious parties objected to Ben Gurion’s economic policies and it is highly likely that there would had been massive starvation of poor olim in the 1950s had Israel been a free market economy at that point. Economic disaster came only after the free market oriented Likud came to power and brought hyperinflation. Command economies can also work very well in brief crises such as in the US during both World War I and World War II.