{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.035840188014101056, 'fraction_numerical': 0.009400705052878966, 'mean_word_length': 4.676666666666667, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Krastev, Ivan, and Stephen Holmes The Light that Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy

Of course, this quotation is from the IMF, and perhaps it is all just capitalist propaganda. Nevertheless, there are similar reports from many countries around the world, and it would have been salutary for Lamb to have addressed the argument that socialists claim to want to help the poor, but, in fact, their preferred policies leave people poor, whereas market-friendly policies actually increase their standard of living. This argument might be incorrect, but it is, at least, worthy of refutation in a book like this one. Lamb, naturally enough, is anxious to disassociate the socialism he likes from National Socialism, or Nazism. He writes, “Nazism did not bring about anything like the combination of freedom and equality that lies at the core of socialism” (45). Neither, of course, have any of the regimes that Lamb does not think of as socialist masquerades. In fact, one of the most famous critiques of socialism, F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press 1944), makes the case that socialism is inherently incapable of bringing about the combination of freedom and equality to which socialists aspire. Again, it may be the case that Hayek is full of it and socialists can readily achieve their aims. Nevertheless, it is surprising that a book aiming to serve as a scholarly introduction to socialism barely mentions Hayek. Nor do we find Ludwig von Mises in the references (the book lacks an index), despite the fact that socialist Oskar Lange wrote, in his paper “On the Economic Theory of Socialism” (Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 53–56, 1936),