New York City’s Socialist Experiment Begins

It would seem a perfect time for Marxists to celebrate. New York City has elected a proud socialist as its mayor.

But if history is any guide, the celebration may be short-lived. Across the world—from the Soviet Union to Venezuela—the antidote to Marxism has always been experiencing Marxism. Indeed, some of the fiercest and most effective critics of Marxism began as Marxists themselves. This was true, for instance, of Robert Nozick, Irving Kristol, Robert Conquest, Paul Johnson, Deirdre McCloskey, Kingsley Amis, and Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.

Of all the intellectuals that started out as collectivists only to become staunch capitalists, perhaps none is more famous than Thomas Sowell. Sowell was drawn to Karl Marx as a young man because, as he put it, the German philosopher explained so much of his “grim experience.” Sowell was born during the Great Depression in Jim Crow North Carolina. He was raised by his great-aunt in a small house on an unpaved street, where he spent his early years without hot water or electricity. As a teenager he lived for a time in a homeless shelter, sleeping with a knife under his pillow. Marxism seemed to explain why people like him had so little while others had so much.

What pierced Sowell’s bubble? He summed it up in one word: “evidence.” That evidence was not gleaned from his studies—indeed he remained a Marxist even while he was at the University of Chicago, studying economics under free-market enthusiast Milton Friedman. It came from the real world.