Socialism Reincarnated
2019-04-11 · Guest: Joshua Muravchik (Author of Heaven on Earth) · 52:17
History and failures of socialism
Bob Zadek interviews Joshua Muravchik about the history, utopian promises, and consistent failures of socialism. They discuss the transition from early communes to “scientific socialism,” the necessity of coercion in socialist states, and the modern “democratic socialist” movement’s misunderstanding of the Scandinavian model.
Topics: Socialism, Marxism, Communism, Utopianism, Free Market, Private Property, Industrial Revolution, Democratic Socialism, Israel, Kibbutzim, Venezuela, Sweden
Speakers: Bob Zadek - Host Joshua Muravchik - Author of Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism
The Economic FDA [00:17]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Thank you so much for listening this beautiful spring Sunday morning.
In our country, we have a series—a bunch—of federal agencies with a considerable amount of power, and their mission is to protect us from making mistakes. For example, we have the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration. The Food and Drug Administration does not permit drugs—new drugs, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs—to be sold to us until they are proven safe and effective. Safe and effective.
And across the street, we have the Securities and Exchange Commission, who make sure that before we are offered a security in the public securities market, that we are given disclosures about the risks and the rewards of this security, and to be sure we are not sold a bill of goods. All of those goals of those agencies are more or less helpful to us; they make life safer and better and help us to be more informed consumers.
However, there is no economic FDA, no economic SEC, to protect us from unsafe and ineffective economic policies. That void in the regulatory scheme—although I am not promoting the creation of another regulatory agency, perish forbid—but that void which protects the average American who does not have deep economic understanding of economic policy, we are unprotected and therefore vulnerable to the concept such as socialism or democratic socialism.
And that is all over the news. We are about to be sold, or there is an attempt to be sold to Americans, a bill of goods: the promise of Nirvana, the promise of unlimited life, the promise of happiness at little or no cost. The promise is being offered to us by the socialist left, the Democratic Socialists of America, AOC, and the socialists such as Bernie Sanders.
To help us to supply the void caused by the absence of an economic FDA, I’m happy to welcome to the show my new best friend forever, Joshua Muravchik. Joshua has just written a book, Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife, regretfully, of Socialism. Joshua knows socialism better than almost anybody I have ever spoken to. Joshua was a socialist and saw the light of day, and now he is an ardent, dare I say, anti-socialist and has seen what is wrong with it. And to help us share all that Joshua has learned, I’m happy to welcome Joshua to the show this morning. Joshua, welcome to the show this morning.
Joshua Muravchik: Well, thanks very much, Bob. It’s fun to be on with you.
Heaven on Earth and the Socialist Religion [04:04]
Bob Zadek: Now, Joshua, your book is entitled, which was just published, Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism. The part of the title I quarrel with is “Heaven.” The one thing socialism does not promise—does not offer—is heaven. It offers the promise of heaven, like a snake oil salesman who promises the cure of a malady, but it is impossible for socialism to get us there. So socialism seems to me to be, as they say in Texas, all hat and no cattle. It seems to be all promises, but it is incapable of delivering. Tell us how socialism, which has never been successful anywhere it has tried on a large or small scale, how it has this staying power, and tell us the history, the successes, if any, and the failures of socialism in our past. Because we have lots of tangible proof of what we are saying.
Joshua Muravchik: Well, Bob, the point of the title is, of course, in a sense tongue-in-cheek. That “Heaven on Earth”—it’s trying to convey two things. One is that over the years, the people who invented and were advocating socialism believed that it was the key to making life perfect or wonderfully better.
Karl Marx, who didn’t take the time to describe exactly how a socialist society might work, but he said once we have socialism, everyone will do just what they feel like, just whatever is fulfilling to them. He said, for example, “I might hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and write literary criticism in the evening.” And that everyone doing exactly what they felt like and what fulfilled them would somehow, all together under socialism, produce super-abundance so that everyone would have more than enough of everything they could possibly want.
And then they had the idea that socialism would create a “new man” that would be somehow better and more capable, with greater powers of creativity than human beings have been until now. Trotsky once said that under socialism, every human being will have the creative powers of a Beethoven or a Goethe. So this was, of course, just letting your imagination roam free. So that was part of what socialism promised.
And the other thing that I’m trying to capture in that title is that I think the key to understanding—and your question was in part, you know, why was this thing so, how did it last so long, why was it so popular, why is it still around—is that it is not just a political idea; it’s a substitute religion. And in fact, Marx and Engels, before they—when they were very young men, before they even came to the idea of socialism or communism—they started out as two guys who hated religion. And their goal was to criticize and bring down religion. They saw religion as the great enemy, and then over a few years, they hit upon communism as the real solution to the problems they were interested in.
Marx, Engels, and the Industrial Revolution [08:24]
Bob Zadek: So, did they learn something from the success and the growth of religious belief that helped them learn how to promote socialism?
Joshua Muravchik: No, I wouldn’t say that. They were actually not very brilliant promoters, except in one sense: Engels was a quite brilliant promoter of Marx. As I see it, Engels was—Marx was in some sense deeper or more complex in his thought, but he was a truly horrible person. And he also—his writing sometimes has very striking turns of phrase or analogies, but also his masterwork that he spent 16 years or more writing, Das Kapital, is actually unreadable. And one of the things I learned in studying this is that no one has ever read it, more or less.
People who adhered to socialism often bought this book and put it on their shelves as a kind of ornament, but it’s impenetrable. But Engels was a guy who really could communicate, and he was a great PR guy. And he actually—no one reviewed Das Kapital, but Engels reviewed it 10 or 12 times under different pseudonyms to trick the publications into thinking that different people had submitted reviews of this new work. And it was Engels who promoted the idea that Marx was the great genius of all time who had figured out all problems. So that was the one area of promotion in which they were talented.
But otherwise, they weren’t very good at promoting their ideas. But the world was changing in the second half of the 19th century with what’s called the Industrial Revolution. There was a huge migration of people all over Europe, not from one country to another so much, but from the countryside into the cities. So the world was becoming industrialized and urbanized. And socialists, really the next generation coming along after Marx and Engels, had this idea that they got from Marxism: that the natural constituency for socialism was the working class. And the socialist parties that were growing up devoted themselves to winning over voters and supporters from among the workers, and the other parties didn’t so much. So it became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in which socialist parties won a lot of support among workers because they were the ones paying attention to them.
The Core Operating System: Collective Ownership [12:06]
Bob Zadek: Now, socialism is an economic system and a social system which makes these lofty promises: everybody’s going to be happy, nobody’s going to work very hard, everybody gets to enjoy self-fulfillment in the extreme. And but when socialism promises these results, socialism also is a system of its view on how to get there. And socialism can be explained very simply. A socialist society, whether it’s a country or a commune, how it works can be described very simply. So give us the two or three simple bullet points of what is the core operating system of a socialist society. How does it propose to get to these promised results? What is the method that it gets there?
Joshua Muravchik: Right. Well, there have been different specific governments and political institutions created, but the generalization is to do away with private property. That property should be owned in common, should be shared somehow. If you’re talking on a small scale, it could be a commune, but on a national scale, it would be that the government takes over ownership of more or less all, at least all business and industry, all economic instruments, so that everything is owned collectively rather than privately. And with that, that the goods or the wealth of society is shared evenly.
The Problem of Determining Needs [14:06]
Bob Zadek: Now, “shared.” It’s going to be shared. Somebody, some institution, is going to decide how it’s shared. So property is now owned collectively, and then it has to be—once the collective owns everything—it now has to redistribute it back to society so society has food and shelter and clothing and things of that nature. So now we have government sucked—or government or whatever it is—sucks up all the property. And now how, by what system, by what method, by what rules does it redistribute the property to all the people who formerly owned it?
Joshua Muravchik: Well, roughly, it’s just supposed to give it out equally. But then there was this slogan that Marx and Engels publicized—I think actually they may have borrowed it from Moses Hess, who in turn may have borrowed it from some earlier thinkers—and it was: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” So there wasn’t necessarily exactly equal amounts of everything because there was some recognition that people’s needs might be different. And that’s, of course, true. And this is, of course, a very sweet idea in the complete abstract: that everyone will do what they can and receive what they need. Lovely.
The obvious problem with it, Bob, is that how do needs get determined? Abilities too, for that matter, but let’s stick with needs for the moment. How do needs get determined? Do I just say what my needs are, or is there some institution or some government office that will assess my needs? And of course, once you start asking that question, the whole idea breaks down.
Bob Zadek: In other words, every citizen, to get anything they believe they need, becomes a supplicant, becomes a beggar. “Please, owner of all the property, please give me what I believe that I need.” And everybody—and I think you pointed this out in a panel discussion you had with Irving Kristol and with the late Charles Krauthammer, I believe you said this—that everybody now becomes a lobbyist all the time for themselves. They go to the body making the distribution and they plead their case. They have to convince a governmental authority, some ruling authority, that they need, i.e., are entitled to something. And it’s a 24-hour-a-day job. And now what you have is not a function of how skillful you were in acquiring property, but what you have is a function of how skillful you are at pleading your victim’s status, your need status. So just imagine a society when everything you have is purely a function of persuading somebody else to give it to you. Oh my god. And everybody becomes a lobbyist 24/7 simply in order to survive. Am I oversimplifying, or is that kind of the way it works?
Humanitarianism vs. Leninism [18:07]
Joshua Muravchik: Well, we don’t say the way it works because it actually has never been able to be put into practice. But in the abstract, that is, I think, how it would have to work. And in a sense, this is all so fantastical that it is a key, I think, to understanding what happened historically to socialism, which is the socialists who formed in the parties and grew up over the 19th century ended up dividing into two camps.
There were some who were genuine humanitarians, idealists; they really wanted the world to be kinder and gentler, and they thought that this system of sharing and common ownership would be a kinder, gentler way to live. Their problem was that they could never put this system into effect. They could never convince enough people that this would be a good idea.
But then there were some others, notably Mr. Lenin and everybody who came after him and followed him down his path, who said, “Look, we’ll never convince people of this, but it’s such a great idea, we just have to shove it down their throat at the point of a gun.” And so that was done in Russia and the surrounding areas that became the Soviet Union. It was done in China and Cuba and Vietnam and around the world. The system we call communism, which was never, never in any country voted in. Everywhere there was communism ruling, by the time it reached its heights, let’s say in the 1970s, 1980s, it ruled about one-third of the people of the world. One-third of the human race was living under one or another of these communist regimes. And yet nowhere did the people choose it. Everywhere there was some armed revolutionary minority that was able to take over a country and shove this system down people’s throats.
And there, nowhere did it actually work the way it was supposed to be. I mean, people did have to plead for what they want, but the ones who were in the communist parties and the ruling elites turned out they had a lot of needs, and they gave themselves lots of goodies. And other people would try to plead for their needs, but it turned out to be that the only way you could convince an official of your needs was to give them a bribe.
The Failure of Early Communes [22:01]
Bob Zadek: And in fact, the communist or the socialist systems, wherever it was tried on a small scale or a large scale, it always failed. And you have in your book—you tell many stories of small and not-so-small experiments. Tell us one or two examples—and these are only examples, it’s true universally—but give us a few examples of a purely socialist system, so it was actually test-driven. It was tried to see if it would work, and tell us about just one or two stories of how it succeeded or actually how it failed.
Joshua Muravchik: Well, let me start out with early history and then we could come back around. The people who invented the word “socialism” were talking back now in the 1820s. And it was a group first started in England around one man named Robert Owen. And he was a successful industrialist, and he had done some significant innovations in the mills that he owned in England, and he got a lot of attention. And then he came up with this idea for common property and so on.
He came to the United States and he announced he was going to build here a commune that would demonstrate to the world what a better system it was to live under socialism and to share everything. And he bought a community that had already been developed by a religious sect in Indiana, and he named it New Harmony. You see, “harmony” like the idea with common property that everybody will be brothers and so on. And he gathered around him, I don’t know, something up to a thousand—maybe it wasn’t quite a thousand—people who thought this would be an exciting idea.
And they settled into New Harmony, and lo and behold, there was no harmony. And there also wasn’t much work. And so within a year, it started breaking down. There was lots of quarreling, and there was very little produced. They didn’t even get to planting crops a great deal of the time, and they—people largely sort of hung around and shot the breeze most of the day. And within two years, it was all over.
And in fact, this was not rare. In the 1800s, there were a great many communes founded in the United States. Land was free or it was cheap, and the country had the big frontier so that if you wanted to have a commune and do things differently from everyone else, no one was going to bother you. That’s why these communes were almost all in the United States rather than in Europe, where it was harder to get land, but also there were more established social expectations and mores, and the people around you might not like you setting up a commune in their neighborhood.
But in the United States, it was easy to do. The communes were of two kinds. Various places around the country, there were religious communes created. Sometimes they shared their property, but their purpose was not socialism; their purpose was to be a community of worship of one version or another. And some of those did quite well. But then there were about 40 to 50 communes like this one, New Harmony, that I mentioned, that were just created by socialists for the purpose of experiencing socialism or and/or proving to the world that socialism was a superior system. And these all broke down very fast and fell apart. The historians who have studied them say that the median lifespan of one of these communes was two years—of the socialist communes. That’s falling apart pretty fast if you pick up and move to a new place for a new way of life and you give up within two years. So they were a uniform disaster.
Scientific Socialism vs. Utopianism [27:26]
Joshua Muravchik: The thing that strikes me, Bob, as really one of the great intellectual con jobs of all time was Marx and Engels come along. And at the point they come along, all these experiments have already failed. And they know that. Engels in particular used to attend the meetings of Owen’s society and read the newspaper that Owen put out. He was well-versed in this. And Marx and Engels said, “Well, all those failures tell us nothing because those people we will label the ‘utopian socialists.’ And utopian doesn’t matter because we have discovered ‘scientific socialism.’”
Scientific socialism, which is the essence of Marxism, is just a prophecy. It’s really just religion. It’s saying, “I know what the future’s going to be. I can see the future, and it’s leading to socialism.” But what’s so hilarious about that is, after all, what is science? The soul of science is experimentation. The people that Marx and Engels dismissed—the failures that they dismissed as utopian—those Owen and those people, as silly as they were, they were really scientific socialists in the sense that they had this idea, they thought it was a great idea, so they experimented. They created communities to test their idea. And the experiments had very clear results: they all failed. And then Marx and Engels come along and say, “Never mind all the results, that’s not scientific. Science is to be found in just pure conjecture.” It was really quite a con trick.
Bob Zadek: And we hear that today with the Democratic Socialists, AOC and Bernie Sanders, where whenever they are asked, “How are you going to pay for this Utopia?” to them, that is a detail they will deal with later.
This is Bob Zadek. We’re speaking with Joshua Muravchik this morning. Joshua has written Heaven on Earth: The Rise, the Fall, and, dare I add, regretful Afterlife of Socialism. We will discuss when we come back from our 30-second break the effect and the relationship between socialism, coercion, the loss of democracy, and the loss of freedom. That is where the rubber hits the road. We’ll be back in 30 short seconds. Please stay tuned.
Coercion and the Welfare State Compromise [32:39]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. And as the man has said, we are the show of ideas, never ever the show of attitude. This morning we are talking with Joshua Muravchik. Joshua has written Heaven on Earth—tongue-in-cheek, as Joshua points out—Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism. Joshua is the unique person to discuss socialism. Joshua was a socialist; he experimented, he was in the movement, as they say, at around the same time as presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
Now, Joshua, socialism, when it has tried to function voluntarily, as you pointed out, it has always been a failure. Therefore, for even socialism to have a shot, since everybody who lives under it hates it, it has to be done with force. And all of the continuing—all of the longer-lived socialist countries only exist through the use of force. That is, you will take your medicine whether you like it or not, because trust us, it is good for you. You must take your medicine or we’re going to kill you.
So what’s strange to me is the Utopia that the Democratic Socialists—and we’ll discuss the distinction between democratic socialism and socialism so that our friends out there understand it—but socialism requires the almost total surrender of autonomy over your person and of your property. You will be told what job you will have, you will be told how you will add to the economic wealth of society, and you will be told how much you can get as a result of living in society. Everything you want to do, you don’t do it by choice; you are told. So can you help us understand how Americans and how any society who grows up understanding and enjoying freedom, and presumably valuing freedom, how are they so willing to surrender freedom for some abstract utopian common good? Can you give us some insight into how freedom becomes a throwaway right that you can just discard?
Joshua Muravchik: Well, I don’t know that it ever does, Bob. I mean, that’s why Lenin and the people who emulated him, like Mao or Fidel or Ho Chi Minh, they understood that they weren’t going to get people to surrender their freedom, so they had to get people to just surrender at the point of a gun.
And other socialists, the democratic kind, when they came into government—which they did, such as the British Labour Party when they first won some elections in England, or the French Socialist Party, or the German or Scandinavian Social Democratic parties (these parties had different names, but they basically stood for the same thing)—these parties, when they sometimes did get voted in, they sometimes did then, once they were voted in, begin to create socialism. That is, to nationalize industries, to take away various elements of private property.
And in each case, what happened was that the economies started sinking. And the socialists themselves, the democratic socialists, realized this wasn’t working. And so what happened was that they all settled for a compromise. They decided that they actually couldn’t build socialism democratically. What they could do was build welfare states. They could increase taxes, they could add some new forms of social insurance or new benefits—things like parental leave or more years of free education or what have you—that they could pay for with taxes up to a certain point. But that if they wanted to have all the money to pay for these benefits, then the wealth of the society was going to be produced in the private sector, and that they’d better leave that alone, even though in theory they didn’t want to, but they realized they had to.
Of course, when I say “leave it alone,” I don’t mean not put on various kinds of regulation, which they did, but leave it alone meaning not take it away, not make it impossible for businessmen to do business and to create wealth.
The Modern Democratic Socialist Movement [37:08]
Bob Zadek: And that’s the model in the Scandinavian countries, is it not? When Bernie Sanders looks longingly at the socialism in Sweden—he always uses Sweden as an example—Sweden is, of course, not a socialist country at all. It is just as you described it: it is a capitalist country with a vigorous free market, with, of course, a substantial amount of private property, because that is the engine. And what Sweden and the others do is, as just as you have explained, they use the golden goose of the free market to drive the welfare system, and they try to find the perfect balance where they can tax it enough—“it” being the private, the free market system—they can tax it enough to pay for substantial welfare benefits, but not tax it or regulate it so much so as to destroy it, because that is the blood, that is the air that drives the welfare system. So they recognize the need for a vigorous free market system. And the democratic socialists seem to have declared war, at least in the U.S., through environmentalism and the like, on the entire free market system. And you don’t hear the democratic socialists right now who have the big megaphones at all embracing the free market system. Am I overstating that?
Joshua Muravchik: No, they certainly don’t embrace it. In fact, what you hear is this sort of relentless abuse. I mean, you hear them talking about the 1% and the billionaires as evil people who need to be done away with—not necessarily executed, but at least their money taken away from them. And it’s hard to see how that is compatible with the idea of allowing free enterprise or allowing businesses to generate wealth. And Ocasio-Cortez is even more strident than Sanders in that respect.
But I want to say something else about them that bothers me, Bob, which is, as I think you mentioned in the intro, when I was young—I’m afraid I’m sad to say that was long ago, I’m talking 50-plus years ago—I became the leader of the Young People’s Socialist League, which I had already been a member of for some years. And that was actually a group that Bernie Sanders also belonged to briefly. And I was then a democratic socialist.
But back then, I and most of the other youngsters who thought as I did, we took the “democratic” part of democratic socialism very much to heart. And so I remember what I believed back then, and there are lots of things I believed—namely in socialist economics—that I look back on now and think were very foolish and naive. But one thing I can say about my young self was that I really believed in democracy. And so I positively hated all those regimes or political movements that called themselves socialist that were violent and dictatorial. I hated the communists, and I hated the other kinds of Third World so-called national liberation movements or what have you that said they were socialist but were also violent and dictatorial. And I drew a very thick line between my imagined ideal of democratic socialism and these other killers and autocrats.
Sanders and AOC don’t draw that line at all. In fact, we see—you can find it on YouTube—Bernie Sanders, when it was still around, visited the Soviet Union and came back and gave a press conference telling us how great it was and how they had better cultural programs and institutions than in the United States and a better subway system. And then he visited Nicaragua in the mid-90s when it was under the rule of the so-called Sandinistas, a group of bloodthirsty communist dictators. And he came back—and you’ll find this on YouTube—and he gave a lengthy interview in which he said they were doing magnificent things.
And it wasn’t just back then; just a couple of years ago, when Fidel Castro died, Sanders was interviewed and praised Castro. And today we have this horrible dictator in Venezuela, Maduro, and his predecessor was Hugo Chavez, who destroyed democracy in that country and then destroyed the economy of that country. And when asked even now to criticize Maduro, Sanders and AOC and the others have refused. And the group—there’s a group called Democratic Socialists of America that AOC belongs to and also this other new congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan—they belong to this group, and you can go to its website and you’ll see they have the slogan “Solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution.” And the Bolivarian Revolution means Maduro’s dictatorial regime.
And so these people are quite willing, eager to support and be enthusiastic about socialist regimes that are bloody, murderous, completely dictatorial. And yet when they get questioned and put on the defensive, then they say, “Oh, we’re just talking about Sweden.” But they’re not just talking about Sweden. Any kind of regime, democratic or undemocratic, is fine with them as long as it calls itself socialist.
The Israeli Kibbutz Exception [47:11]
Bob Zadek: And so what we have learned, and what you will teach us in your book, is that pure socialism—or the closer you get to pure socialism—as an economic system, it cannot survive. Never in the history of Earth has it ever survived for very long absent the total surrender of civil rights and living under the boot of a strong government using coercion, force, imprisonment, and death. It cannot survive. It is doomed; it cannot succeed. It is neither safe nor effective.
And what you also learn from the book is that the free market system is the engine that drives economic well-being that allows people to live full lives. You also learn that there may be a role—it is rational to balance, if the body politic wants to do it, to balance, to adjust to some degree what is now called income inequality and move some money around in wealth transfers so that the people who don’t have enough might get a bit more. I prefer it be done voluntarily, but Sweden has shown us there is a way to transfer wealth without destroying the engine, the golden goose of the free market. And but the acknowledgment of the importance of the free market is totally missing from the conversation on the political left.
And also, if we can, Joshua, we only have a few minutes left. Doesn’t socialism of necessity require the total surrender of personal autonomy, the total surrender of anything resembling freedom to decide how you’re going to spend your day, your life, and your resources? And isn’t that a cornerstone of any socialist system, is the total surrender of civil rights in favor of some abstract public good?
Joshua Muravchik: If you want to have full socialism, I think yes. We have one counter-example, which was in Israel on the kibbutzim—or if people don’t know, “kibbutzim” is the plural in Hebrew for kibbutz. And these were socialist communes that really did work.
But two things: they tried really to also accommodate different needs and wishes of the people who lived on the kibbutz, and they were an important part of Israel. But they weren’t whole countries; they were just a bunch of these communes so that the people who were there were all there voluntarily. It’s a different thing from a government imposing a system where you have to go along or else you can emigrate, but emigration is very hard. But a country that would impose a system, people would really be stuck, whereas a kibbutz in Israel was a voluntary thing.
Those communities in Israel—there are about 200 of them—actually succeeded very well for a time. But then they all, after a couple of generations or several decades, they almost all voted to transform themselves to a free-market basis. And what we learned in studying them was that they worked fine because the people who settled on them were passionate Zionists. This was during or in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and these people who came to Israel—or some of them were set up before there was an Israel, came to Mandatory Palestine—were imbued with the idea that they were part of something really important, which is rescuing the Jewish people after 2,000 years of exile and after the Holocaust and creating a new country where the Jews could live and be safe. And they were very passionate about that, and so they were able in that context to kind of ignore the fact that the system that they had was not a very comfortable way to live, with everything being shared, you couldn’t have anything of your own, and everybody was kind of necessarily involved in everybody else’s business. And so once Israel was firmly established and felt relatively secure on its feet, then one by one they said, “Let’s get rid of this and stop living in this uncomfortable way and just be a normal community in which everybody has their own property and their own job and never mind this socialist way of life.”
Bob Zadek: So the kibbutzim succeeded because there was this overriding passion for Zionism to help this young country succeed, and that provided additional energy that pure socialist society does not. Joshua, how can our friends out there follow your writing? How can they learn what you are thinking from time to time, and what other books are you working on? We have about 30 seconds.
Joshua Muravchik: Well, I encourage them to buy my book, Heaven on Earth, but also I do have a website called joshuamuravchik.com—J-O-S-H-U-A-M-U-R-A-V-C-H-I-K.com—and you can see my books there and my articles, and you can also sign—click a link, sign up for a list, and I will ever after send you copies of my articles.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much, Joshua, for giving us an hour of your time. It was a wonderful hour. We learned a lot, and we will all know how to vote this November. Thanks a lot to Joshua and thanks to my friends out there. I’ll be back again next Sunday. Thanks so much.