Classical liberals and economists like Bastiat, Hayek, Friedman, and Sowell warned against socialism for violating property rights, lacking economic knowledge, and enabling the worst people to rise to power.

First-hand accounts from Malcolm Muggeridge and Margarete Buber-Neumann reveal the brutal reality of Soviet communism, including engineered famines, purges, Gulag labor camps, and the chilling similarities between Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany.

The article argues that modern “democratic socialists” ignore these historical lessons and eyewitness testimonies, repeating the same ideological errors that led to totalitarian regimes.

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........

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