A Warning from Poland’s Lech Walesa

By Dan Mitchell.

"Just last month, I cited some academic research showing how Poland’s economy dramatically approved after the fall of the Soviet Empire and the country escaped socialism.

The change has been dramatic. Indeed, Poland has easily out-performed China in recent decades, showing that decent economic policy is much better than bad-but-not-totally-awful economic policy.

Unfortunately, not everyone understands that socialism is bad news.

I can understand why politicians like the idea. They have a “public choice” incentive to grab more control over the economy.

But I don’t understand why some young people are sympathetic to this totalitarian economic system.

I’ve done everything I can to explain why socialism is a failure, but perhaps I’m not the right messenger.

So let’s look at what the leader of Poland’s first independent union said to them.

Lech Walesa. Of the giants who brought down the Iron Curtain — among them Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II, Vaclav Havel — only Walesa is still with us. At 79, he still looks as vigorous as the young electrician who led a workers’ uprising against the “dictatorship of the proletariat”; forced Poland’s Marxist regime to recognize the first independent trade union in the communist world; was imprisoned under martial law only to later force his former jailers at the negotiating table to allow free elections… What is his message for young people who have no living memory of communism? “Many young people are actually fooled to accept communism as an idea,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. “There are beautiful sentences talking about equality, about justice. … But as soon as you start putting that system into practice, all sorts of serious disasters come about. But young people quite often don’t know it. We have experience [with socialism], so we really know something about it. So, I strongly recommend rejecting it.”

That’s very good advice.

Unless, of course, you have a very perverse desire to create more deprivation and misery in the world."