The main thrust of this article is something completely different but what really caught my eye was this:

Russia loses around 700,000 people each year – about 0.5 per cent of its total population – to emigration, disease and alcoholism.

It would appear that the “benefits” of socialism last for quite some time after the system has collapsed. One would hope that people not try another “experiment” such as that ever again. What is it? Something like 100 million dead in the last century that can be attributed to socialism and communism? And if the above numbers are correct and characteristic of what happens when socialism collapses one may even make a prediction.  And that prediction would be that the implementation of a “workers paradise” means the complete death of that society. It may be that the only escape from the death throes of that type of disaster is for some other culture to salvage the remnants and rebuild it in a completely different image.

But one could always hope people could learn from the failure of others. But that hope would only reveal that I’m an optimist even in the face of irrefutable evidence to the contrary. I do have irrefutable evidence that people don’t learn from the failures of others–there are still people that vote for the Socialists Democrats in our country.