“The soul-crushing misery, the mass exodus to get out, the endless broken promises so endemic to socialism simply cannot be dismissed as the failures of a few bad people. There’s something rotten in the system itself. Indeed, the very ideas from which it springs are rotten. At socialism’s core is end-justifies-the-means, moral relativist, anti-individual and collectivist rubbish. Bad people are everywhere, but nothing brings them forth and licenses them to do evil more thoroughly than concentrated power and the subordination of morality to the service of a statist ideology. That is the essence of the socialist vision, the iron fist within the velvet glove that belies all the happy talk to the contrary” — economist, historian and think tank president Lawrence W. Reed.