Can There be an "After Socialism"?

The following essay by  Alan Charles Kors was published by The Atlas Society on September 27, 2003:

https://atlassociety.org/objectivism/atlas-university/deeper-dive-blog/3962-can-there-be-an-after-socialism

This is a powerfully worded indictment of politicians and intellectuals for their lack of atonement for supporting socialism.  One of the highlights from the essay is this paragraph:

"No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: "No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into." Until that happens, there is no "after socialism.""

For detailed statistics of the human carnage under socialism see this website:

http://www.scottmanning.com/content/communist-body-count/?fref=gc

Representative Government Suffers from the Principal-Agent Problem

 A recent article by Robert Higgs was published by the Independant Institute.  A few of the highlights are as follows:

...the framers of the U.S. Constitution created an institutional framework for the operation not of a democracy, but of a representative republic. There’s that troublesome word – representative.

It’s not simply that the so-called representatives are bad or corrupt, though they may be. It’s that the job they purport to do cannot be done even by the finest, most uncorrupted representatives imaginable.

No agent can truly represent a variegated group of principals, especially a large one whose members disagree along many dimensions. Some principals will have their interests seemingly fostered; others will not. The latter will simply be bludgeoned by force of law to submit.

The complete article is at this link:

 http://blog.independent.org/2017/08/24/principal-agent-theory-and-representative-government/

Labor Day