by Shawn Ritenour
Mises.org
One of the points I like to stress in my introductory economics course, as well in my course on Economic Expansion and Development is that socialism, when implemented, results in poverty, starvation, death, and cultural ossification. The more hard-core socialist the system is, the worse its problems. Mary Anastasia O’Grady documents this in a short essay in the Wall Street Journal. It is an excellent primer in the problems of socialism in which she uses Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil” to illustrate what any economic system must do if society is to survive. As O’Grady notes: