The Gulag by Applebaum

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People stop working very hard under socialism, which was a course of one of the earliest complaints about socialism. It's maybe doubly ironic that when capitalism has semi-capitalism, some form of market processes returned to the Soviet Union. So it's an interesting little bit of deja vu there. Of course, apologists for capitalism often say, well, has it worked for well because they've been used to slacking and where corruption is the way that you get ahead.

Bryan Caplan of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about two books: Eugene Richter's Pictures of the Socialistic Future and F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. Both books warn against the dangers of socialism. Pictures of a Socialistic Future, published in 1891 is a dystopian novel imagining what life would be like after a socialist revolution. The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, explores the links between economic freedom and political freedom and the inherent similarities between communism and fascism. Both books look at the German roots of centralized planning and the nature of the people who rise to power when the State is powerful. The conversation includes discussion of the these topics as well as the rule of law and the amount of state control of the economy in Nazi Germany.