North Korea by Night

Or how to send a nation of millions back to the cave

In science when you want to test a theory you create two groups from which you will collect your data; a test group and a control group. You leave the control group as it currently is and you implement your idea on the test group. In this way you get to see the differences, if any, that are created by your idea when put into practice. In the case of the utopian plans of socialists and communists we have had several side by side tests which have shown the difference between communism and capitalism when they are put into practice.

Here we have a photograph taken from space which shows the Korean peninsula at night. Notice anything? OK, that was a rhetorical question. Because what we see here are the real world effects of two different ideas when they are put into practice. In North Korea we have communism, and in the South we have capitalism.

In this photo we see the bright lights of cities and towns all across South Korea that would be familiar to anyone who lives in the West and who is used to a modern, industrial standard of living. Even in the middle of the night there is activity in most urban areas and towns as people enjoy different forms of night life or get home late from work. But in the North we see nothing but unending darkness. Why would that be?

Well the reason is simple. Communism is not a system that works. Or to be more precise, Karl Marx, who advocated the communist ideal, never came up with an explanation of just how a communist society would actually be able to create wealth in the absence of a capitalist society from which it could be expropriated. Communism claims to be an economic theory, but it has no idea of how to generate goods and services for the people who live under it. Moreover, communists have a completely unrealistic view of human nature woven into their theory of how things should be. They speak of "collectives" and "the masses" and of class theory. But the reality is that people in the real world respond to individual wants and needs and most of all to incentives.

Capitalism recognizes the real nature of human beings with all of their requirements, impulses and motives and flaws. And it has a system of wealth creation which is rooted in real world experience as well as a complex theory of prices, production and finance which is vital to any advanced society. Communist societies lack these things, which is why North Korea is left in the dark after the sun goes down.

The satellite image of the North in darkness is living, visual proof of yet another failure of utopian communist ideology to bring the people under it anything other than misery and suffering. For while the Angry Left is denouncing capitalism and swooning over revolutionary communism, the starving people of North Korea are reduced to eating the bark off of trees in order to keep from dying. This is what the people in the Angry Left are trying push us towards, if they can. And somehow, all of the evidence in the world of its failure won't keep them from trying it again, in the vain hope that this time it might just work.