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| Dr. Ivan Pongracic |
My wife Andrée tells me the State of Connecticut is fortunate to have among us the Blake Center for Faith & Freedom in Somers Connecticut, and not just for aesthetic reasons. The Blake Center is a brick-by-brick replica, of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home in Virginia once owned by the founder of Friendly’s Ice Cream.
The Blake Center is an outpost of Hillsdale College in Michigan, and
Hillsdale is a wonder of the post-modern world, a financially independent college
that has promoted for more than 170 years “the diffusion of sound learning” as
the best means of preserving “the blessings of civil and religious liberty and
intellectual piety.”
On June 26th the Blake Center hosted Professor of Economics Dr.
Ivan Pongracic, William E. Hibbs/Ludwig Von Mises Chair of Economics at
Hillsdale College who, it was promised, would guide the audience, 120 strong packed
elbow to elbow, in “an assessment of socialism’s failure.” Pongracic believes
that beauty and good in the world is providential rather than a mere matter of
fortune, and those of us who are not, like Karl Marx, aggressive atheists have
been called upon to defend both.
He did not disappoint. In one sense, Pongracic’s assignment
was a walk-in-the park for any student of history used to traveling through
recent history with open eyes. One has only to describe accurately socialism’s
way through the world in the 19th and 20th centuries to
arrive at the obvious conclusion that socialism and its many iterations –
communism is one – has been a spectacular failure.
Pongracic began his address by mentioning his father, a man
of uncommon courage, and his childhood in Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia. His
father, temperamentally unsuited to what Thomas Jefferson earlier characterized
as “all forms of tyranny over the mind of man,” ran into the usual problem with
the enforcement arm of socialist government and was in danger of being
imprisoned. He was saved by the intervention of police who knew him well and
later immigrated to America when his son was 14.
Pongracic’s bona fides are
impressive: “He earned his doctorate in economics from George Mason University
in 2004 and has worked with many economic policy organizations through the
years, among them the Foundation for Economic Education, The Independent
Institute, Cato Institute, Mercatus Center, Young America’s Foundation, and the
Liberty Fund. His book Employees and Entrepreneurship was published in 2009 by
Edward Elgar Publishing.”
The man himself is soft spoken, personable, highly
intelligent, a close and fervent student of Ludwig von Mises, the Saint Paul of
the Austrian school of Economics and the Author of Human Action: a Treatise on Economics.
Don’t be fooled by the many false claims of socialism, Pongracic
told his rapt listeners. The so called variants of socialism all have one thing
in common: the seizure of the means of production and the enfeeblement of a
market economy. The market economy, we all know, is a much better distributor
of wants and needs than, say, socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, still
honeymooning intellectually with post-Soviet and South American communists such
as Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
A state directed economy rarely produces prosperity,
Pongracic pointed out, because a market economy in which wants and desires are
enforced by purchasers is a precondition of a rational economic system, and
these preconditions cannot be met in a command economy that bypasses the market
– something socialist Zohran Mamdani, who just won a New York Democrat Party
primary contest for Mayor of New York City, might mull over before he creates
his network of state owned grocery stores. In socialist and communist counties,
state owned or managed grocery stores produced nothing but long purchasing lines
and empty shelves.
Just as grocery items disappeared from shelves under the communist
regime of Joseph Stalin following the seizure of agricultural production in
Ukraine and Russia and the nationalization of businesses, so a once vibrant oil
industry in Venezuela all but disappeared following the socialist government
seizure of the nation’s oil industry.
Pongracic turned to two Venezuelans in his audience and asked,
“Am I right about Venezuela?” under the socialist regime of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás
Maduro, who stole his most recent election though ballot fraud and voter
intimidation.”
Their response, heavy with the misery of lost liberty, was
emphatic, “You are right!”
A command economy, dependent entirely on force, cannot work
in a democratic state in which the departments of governance – executive,
legislative and judicial – are separate and independent from each other. The
unity of purpose under a socialist system in which everyone is forced to march
into an uncertain future under a strongman has been efficient only in the
destruction of personal liberty.
Stalin’s strength – he was called “the breaker of nations” –
produced in Ukraine, known since Roman times as “the breadbasket of Europe,” a
famine, the Holodomor, in which more than four million people starved. The four
million statistic may represent an undercount of an additional four million
people because population data was unaccountably found missing during the
famine years, 1932-33.
“There is no manner of death worse than starvation,”
Pongracic pointed out. Communist collectivist had shown themselves
super-efficient in collecting seed grain in Ukraine in 1932, which produced a
massive famine in 1933.
Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ chief Moscow reporter
during the Holodomor, received a Pulitzer
Prize for reporting that famines, easily managed, were not unusual in Ukraine.
Malcolm Muggeridge, the well-known British writer who also served on the Moscow
desk during the famine years secretly took a train into the ravaged
countryside, where trees were stripped of leaves by people forced by starvation
to eat them, and reported accurately on the famine. His reports were smuggled
out of Moscow in British diplomatic pouches. Muggeridge said that Duranty was
the worse pathological liar he had met in all is years in journalism.
A lack of wanted goods, a lack of liberty and the rise of
tyrannical regimes are the certain historical characteristics of the mature
socialist state. Why then are young people here in the United States uplifted
by the myths of socialism?
The popularity among young people of avowed socialist Zohran Mamdani, the Democrat Party choice for
New York City Mayor, distresses but does not surprise Pongracic, who has
witnessed this precise arc of history many times before. Democrat Party
leaders, practiced in the art of wrapping extreme leftists in a cloak of
moderate invisibility, are up against it this time. Mamdani is boisterously socialist
and anti-capitalist. His far left positions on important issues place him
squarely in the socialist camp among an assortment of 20th and 21st
century authoritarian tyrants.
Pongracic’s liberating message – especially to young
students, Hillsdale’s specialty -- is that socialism has never worked in elevating
the proletariat in any nation where it has taken hold.
Marx famously said that philosophers before the advent of
Marx were content to explain history, but the prime directive of communist
socialists is to change history. And the historic effects of such changes – the
terror, the gulags, the deification of God-hating academics and left of center
political influencers – are plainly visible, as George Orwell used to say,
right under our noses.
How is it we cannot see these economic terrorists wrapped in
their rhetorical cloaks of invisibility?
It is part of the mission of Hillsdale College in Michigan
and its outpost in Connecticut, the Blake Center for Faith and Freedom, to rip
away all political artifice and show the thing as it is and will be. In this
battle for the minds and hearts of true democrats, missionaries such as
Pongracic are indispensable in securing Faith and Freedom for our future
enlightened leaders.
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