I have been asked why I criticize liberalism here, why I criticize conservatism, and why I do not direct my fire against the third great ideology—socialism.
The answer is simple: because socialism is gone. It has collapsed. It no longer exists.
What does exist is a continual shifting of the definition of what “socialism” supposedly means. The definition has drifted so far that what was regarded in 1970 as brutally free-market was being labeled “socialist” by 1990. What was considered brutally free-market in 1990 was being called “socialist” by 2010. In the process, socialism in its original sense has vanished entirely—the belief that factories should be owned by the state and that the purpose of enterprise must not be profit.
From a purely intellectual standpoint, I actually miss socialism. Not because I believe its premises were correct, but because the debate was richer and more demanding when it existed as a serious alternative. We might have arrived at insights that now escape us. At the very least, socialism forced its opponents to justify—and therefore to think through—their own positions more carefully.
And that socialism, in one form or another, failed in practice? The same, after all, can be said of conservatism and liberalism.