Can We Add Vietnam To The List Of Countries Abandoning Socialism?

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  • Even as New York City looks poised to try one more time to make socialism work, multiple countries that have gone down the socialist road are trying instead to turn off.

  • Notable examples include Argentina, where President Xavier Milei’s party just scored a notable victory over the Peronists in legislative elections; and Bolivia where, in the August 2025 first round of the presidential election, after nearly 20 years of explicitly socialist rule under the MAS Party, accompanied by economic stagnation, the MAS candidate for President got just 2% of the vote.

  • Can we add Vietnam to the list of countries moving away from socialism?

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Magical Thinking Is Why Socialists Get Everything Wrong

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  • What is the source of the wealth of a nation? That’s actually the question addressed by Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations.”

  • Smith doesn’t put it in these exact terms, but his answer lies in some combination of hard work of the people plus figuring out how to work more efficiently through specialization and exchange.

  • And then there’s the other theory that the wealth just appears somehow, by luck or magic (or maybe by oppression of marginalized peoples). Which theory you buy into has everything to do with what you might think are appropriate public policies.

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This Time Socialism Is Really Going To Work, Bolivia Edition

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This Time Socialism Is Really Going To Work, Bolivia Edition

  • As all good true believers know, the only reason that Socialism has thus far always failed in practice is that real Socialism has never yet been implemented. And thus we have my home town of New York, until now the world capital of capitalism, about to put into office a self-proclaimed Socialist, or maybe Communist, to give Socialism just one more shot.

  • How could large numbers of seemingly intelligent people believe that this could work? One reason is a remarkable lack of news coverage of the economic status and trajectory of the places that avowedly practice Socialism. My mission here at Manhattan Contrarian is to fix that.

  • Consider Bolivia.

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The New York Times And The Approaching New York Mayoral Election

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The New York Times And The Approaching New York Mayoral Election

  • In the early days of this blog — say, prior to about 2020 — I made a regular sport of heaping scorn on the New York Times.

  • Every week or two I would take a particularly preposterous article and attempt to analyze whether it represented incomprehensible ignorance of the world versus intentional deception of the readership. Or maybe both! More recently, the Times has gotten so crazy, and the craziness so widely recognized, as rarely to justify such an effort on my part.

  • But then, sometimes I can’t stop myself. Take today’s Times.

  • As background, yesterday was the occasion of the last televised debate in the three-way mayoral race among Zohran Mamdani (Democrat), Andrew Cuomo (Independent) and Curtis Sliwa (Republican). Election Day is only 12 days away, and early voting starts in two days.

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A Bright New Energy Dawn In The UK

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  • It was just a couple of weeks ago — October 3 to be precise — that I reported that the long-running “net zero” political consensus in the UK was finally “crumbling.” In the intervening two-plus weeks, the slow crumbling has turned into a rapid collapse.

  • The biggest roadblock for opponents of a green energy transition in the UK has been that the Conservative Party, which should have been the natural home of opposition to net zero, has instead long (and foolishly) allied itself with the net zero cause. In June 2019, the Conservatives (under Prime Minister Theresa May) put through an ambitious amendment to enhance the net zero targets of the 2008 Climate Act, and then proceeded to a general election that December where they won a substantial majority of 365 seats (in a parliament of 650).

  • In subsequent years, a parliamentary faction in the House of Commons called the Net Zero Scrutiny Group struggled to get to about 50 or so Conservative members, who were far outnumbered by the opposing faction of the same party called the Conservative Environment Network. The UK voters had surely demonstrated their climate virtue.

  • But unfortunately things did not work out quite as they had anticipated.

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