Title: Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and the Attempted Revival in the United States
Author: Phillip J. Bryson
Publisher: XlibrisUS
ISBN: 978-1-5144-1460-6
Pages: 944
Genre: Political Science / Political Ideologies / Communism & Socialism
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Synopsis
Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and Attempted Revival in the United States This book is an attempt to address all the important economic aspects of socialism—the concepts and theories, the historical attempts to implement socialist economic systems, and the endeavor to establish socialism in the United States. Part I reviews the origins and ideas of socialism, which reflect an aspiration radically to transform the market system, the great advantages of which were explained by Adam Smith. Part II reviews the establishment of Marxist-Leninist economic systems in the USSR and the East European countries. The movement featured central economic planning, which survived from the 1920s until about 1990; its failure was the attempt of statist organization to crush the market system and replace it with Stalinist “command” planning. Central planning was meticulously copied in the bloc countries of East Europe, in China, in India, and elsewhere. The national replications of central economic planning always produced the same disappointing, usually disastrous results. Efforts to reform the system always failed. Meanwhile, the democratic countries of Western Europe established socialist parties and policies, but in less than a century after Marx, the great hopes of socialism to achieve successful and productive nationalization of industries on the basis of a national economic plan had been recognized as unproductive and undesirable. Part III reviews the failed attempt to establish a viable socialist party in the United States. The real thrust toward socialism, originally launched by the New Deal of Roosevelt, came when Barak Obama, a thoroughly indoctrinated and dedicated socialist, ascended to the US presidency. This socialism is an attempt to expand income redistribution and social welfare policies and to pursue massive industrial regulation and unconstitutional interventions in the private sector. The implications of these policies are discussed together with the associated loss of market freedoms and personal liberties.
About the Author
Phillip J. Bryson became professor emeritus of economics in the Marriott School of Brigham Young University in 2010. He began his teaching career as a PhD student instructor at the Ohio State University in 1965 and became an assistant professor at the University of Arizona in 1967. In 1988, he left Arizona to join the Marriott School Faculty of Brigham Young University. He researched and taught comparative economic systems, international economics, and the history of economic analysis. His publications in the early part of his career were mostly on the central planning systems of East Germany and the Soviet Union. On several occasions, he lived and worked in West Berlin and East Berlin (Karlshorst), Munich, Marburg, Duisburg, Vienna, London, and Moscow. He was living in Berlin when the wall was erected in August of 1961 and was attending a conference in the Reichstag in West Berlin when the wall was declared open in November of 1989. When the Marxist-Leninist economies of East Europe were transitioning to capitalism, Professor Bryson researched the fiscal decentralization of the public sectors of the Czech and Slovak Republics. In retirement, Professor Bryson decided to write about the economic system of socialism, a topic to which he had devoted his entire career. The effort was motivated by his concern about the fiscal, social, and political implications of the socialistic policy initiatives of the Obama administration.
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