Said Very Well

"Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be.  It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization has created.  It does not build; it destroys.  For destruction is the essence of it.  It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created."  Ludwig von Mises

"Much of what government does is based on the premise that people can't do things for themselves.  So government must do it for them.  More often than not, the result is ham-handed, bumbling, one-size fits all approach that leaves the intended benificiaries worse off.  Of course, this resulting failure is never blamed on the political approach - on the contrary, failure is taken to mean that the government solution was not extravagant enough"  John Stossel

"With the abolition of the market in Russia, shortages of food, clothing and all kinds of consumer goods became endemic.  As peasants fled the collective villages, major cities were soon in the grip of an acute housing crisis, with families jammed for decades in tiny single rooms in communal apartments....It was a world of privation, overcrowding, endless queues, and broken families, in which the regimes' promises of future socialist abundance rang hollow...Government bureaucracy often turned everyday life into a nightmare."  Sheila Fitzpatrick