All Socialists Are Ignorant… But Some Are More Ignorant than Others

In The Law, published in 1850, Frédéric Bastiat made a case against “legal plunder,” the perversion of the law to violate liberty and property rights. Nearly 100 years later in The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek warned that socialists, whatever their intentions, lacked the knowledge to command the economy.

Hayek also explained how the worst always get on top in socialist regimes, and after the German National Socialists’ Anschluss in 1938, he did not return to his native Austria. In 1983, President Reagan brought Hayek to the White House, and in 1991 President George H.W. Bush awarded Hayek the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman authored Capitalism and Freedom and became a national figure with the “Free to Choose” series on PBS. Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell also upheld the virtues of the market over government command of the economy. Those now proudly calling themselves “democratic socialists” seem unaware of these authors and show little if any inclination to engage in debate.

The surging socialists are even more unaware of works that show socialism as it actually existed under its most enthusiastic promoters. Consider, for example, the experience of Malcolm Muggeridge. His magisterial Chronicles of Wasted Time (1972) devotes a chapter to “A Socialist Upbringing.” The Muggeridge household jostled with politicians, scholars, and clergy dedicated to the cause, along with Labor Party stalwarts such as Ramsey MacDonald and Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Their collective efforts aimed to benefit “the workers,” who were never present at any of their events.

“A worker is someone for whom everything is done as long as he keeps off stage,” Muggeridge noted, and “the whole notion of a working class with a specific political or cultural, or even spiritual role qua working class is a fantasy invented by guilt-stricken renegade proletarians like D.H. Lawrence, or by renegade bourgeoisie on the run like William Morris or, for that matter, Marx and Engels themselves, or just by a sociologist looking for a subject and a job.”

After stints teaching in India and Egypt, Muggeridge wound up in the first “workers’ state,” the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), as the Moscow correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. Correspondents ran contests to see who could pass off the most fatuous story to the regime’s foreign admirers. Muggeridge convinced Lord Marley that the long lines for everything were intended to give zealous workers a chance to rest. When a British lawyer asked if the Soviets practiced habeas corpus, A.T. Cholerton of the Daily Telegraph told him they strictly adhered to habeas cadaver.

Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture claimed more than a million victims in Ukraine, but Walter Duranty of the New York Times contended that there was no forced famine there. Muggeridge decided to see for himself. “This particular famine was planned and deliberate, not due to any natural catastrophe like failure of rain, or cyclone, or flooding,” he wrote. “There is not only a famine but a state of war, a military occupation… Peasants with their hands tied behind their back being loaded into cattle-trucks at gunpoint.” After breaking this story, Muggeridge was widely vilified while Duranty’s mendacious reports won a Pulitzer Prize.

In August, 1939, Stalin signed a pact with Hitler’s Germany. “I had been expecting such a development,” Muggeridge wrote, “never losing an opportunity to say that Bolshevism and National Socialism were the same thing, except that one was a Slav version and the other Teutonic.” Margarete Buber-Neumann described that reality in Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler.

The Potsdam native married Heinz Neumann, a rising star in the German Communist Party (KDP). The Communist International (Comintern) sent the couple on various assignments before bringing them to Moscow during Stalin’s purge campaign. Heinz Neumann was tried and executed the same day with no word to Margarete. She soon found herself in the Lubianka prison before being sentenced to five years in the corrective labor camps then holding 1.3 million prisoners.

In the vast Karaganda complex, Buber-Neumann was forced to perform “a certain labor quota” in the fields. “We were always hungry,” the prisoner wrote, and field workers were in the “fourth and worst category” when it came to food. In these conditions, Zena, a Gypsy girl, is told she should go to school and learn about socialism.“I don’t like it!” Zena shoots back “You can go and **** your mother with your socialism! I’m a free Gypsy.”

Preyed on by criminals, who were very cozy with camp bosses, Margarete manages to survive. During the Stalin-Hitler Pact, the secret police (GPU) changed her sentence to removal from the Soviet Union.

In early 1940 the Soviets put the prisoner of Stalin on a train headed for the Brest-Litovsk bridge into occupied Poland. There GPU men and SS officers jointly check the list of names. The prisoners were then “sent on in cattle trucks to Bialas” and “marched through the streets under SS guard.” Then it was on to Ravensbrück, the National Socialists’ largest concentration camp for women. In Under Two Dictators, Buber-Neumann describes the forced labor, torture, and executions in exacting detail.

“Historians have long regarded it as a standard work on Nazi camps and the Gulag,” notes professor Nikolaus Wachsman in his introduction. “But among a general readership in the English-speaking world, the book is virtually unknown.” The fearful symmetry of German National Socialism and Soviet Communism doubtless caused journalists, academics and politicians deliberately to ignore the book.

Add these works to those of George Orwell, whose 1984 portrayed the totalitarian world of Ingsoc (English Socialism). In Orwell’s Animal Farm, the revolutionary victors proclaim that all animals are equal — but some more equal than others. In 2026 safe to say, all socialists are ignorant, but some more ignorant than others — and willfully so.

Arthur Koestler took note of Buber-Neumann’s experience in his contribution to The God That Failed, published in 1949. In Arrow in the Blue (1952) Koestler explained, “The well-meaning ‘progressives of the Left’ persist in following their old, outworn concepts. As if under the spell of a destructive compulsion, they must repeat every single error of the past. One can only watch in horror and despair, for this time there will be no pardon.”

Those who value their liberty must decide how that applies moving forward.