Fraser Institute
‘New Socialist Man’ was a selfish corrupt cheat

From the Fraser Institute
It’s a common trope that capitalism corrupts. Anyone who has spent time with our species knows that we can be avaricious, materialist and selfish. Tempting as it may be to think that socialism would make us better, it seemed to make us worse.
The communist revolution sought to reshape the economy by giving government control over the means of production. But socialist revolutionaries had more than the economy in their sights. They aimed for nothing less than an extreme makeover of human nature. Unfortunately, actual socialism seemed to make people worse, not better.
Why did socialists seek to change man?
Marx believed that “the essence of man” was “no abstraction inherent in each single individual.” Instead, this essence was “the ensemble of the social relations.” And by changing social relations, he believed man could be changed for the better.
For his part, Stalin saw that certain aspects of human nature were stumbling blocks to the socialist dream. In 1935 he told a conference of collective farm labourers that “a person is a person. He wants to own something for himself.” It will “take a long time yet to rework the psychology of the human being, to reeducate people to live collectively.”
But Stalin and others believed that, given enough time, socialism would create what they called the “New Socialist Man.” He would be intelligent, healthy, muscular, selfless and supremely dedicated to the cause. Basically, he’d look like everyone in the socialist “realist” paintings that the government compelled artists to paint.
He would care less about his private life and his family and more about society-at-large. It was in this vein that Soviet education theorists taught that “By loving a child, the family turns him into an egotistical being, encouraging him to see himself as the centre of the universe.” In the place of such “egoistic love” the state encouraged “rational love” of the broader “social family.”
Socialists had a practical reason for remaking man. Without economic freedom, citizens had little incentive to produce. In a capitalist society, Adam Smith’s butcher, brewer and baker serve us dinner because they are incentivized to do so; it puts money in their pockets and food in the bellies of their children. But in a state-run canteen the workers were paid whether they served decent food or not. The socialists hoped that by remaking human nature—by creating a New Socialist Man motivated to serve others and not just himself and his family—they could solve this incentive problem.
How did people change?
As I’ve explained in an earlier post, the incentive problem was never solved. The New Socialist Man never got very good at serving others, so socialist societies were systematically poor.
But what happened to human nature? Did they succeed in changing it? The species evolves over generations so, of course, the seven-decade socialist experiment didn’t alter human genes (when Marx sent a copy of Das Kapital to Charles Darwin, it apparently sat unread on Darwin’s shelf). But socialism did have a profound effect on cultural norms and attitudes. And these changes were almost entirely for the worse.
In my book on Poland with Pete Boettke and Konstantin Zhukov, we quote one Pole from the late-1980s who observed: “one can make a generalization that everybody in Poland who has the chance engages in a good deal of stealing, cheating, and supplementing his or her income by illegal means.”
Another complained: “Why must I so often do things to get a promotion or improve my family’s living standard that run against my conscience? Why and how has it become true that I am a swine? When did I realize it, and when did I stop caring?”
Socialist planners also worried about cultural decline: “What is going to happen to the character of the young generation,” a state planner asked, “if from the very beginning of their working career in the enterprise, they are being taught and morally forced to cheat at the expense of the whole society?”
In our Estonia book, we quote Václav Havel, the poet-playwright-dissident who became Czechoslovakia’s last president. He identified the problem in his New Year’s address of 1990:
We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities… I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact, and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all—though naturally to differing extents— responsible for the operation of totalitarian machinery, none of us is just its victims; we are all also its cocreators.
Even Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev complained in his autobiography of “a gradual erosion of the ideological and moral values of our people.”
Why was the New Socialist Man a worse man?
The control problem is one explanation for this gradual erosion of moral values. With no carrots in the form of market incentives, socialist leaders deployed a terrifying array of sticks—mass deportation, widespread surveillance, arrests and slave labour. They even weaponized children against their parents (a topic I plan to cover in a future post). And since the socialist revolution was built around the notion of class warfare, the socialists felt justified in using these sticks against any class that stood in their way: kulaks, capitalists, ethnic minorities, nationalists, internationalists, left deviationists, right deviationists, religious leaders, cultural icons and intellectuals.
In the face of such widespread terror, it’s no wonder that the socialist state bread cultural habits of anger and distrust. But terror was not the only source of cultural rot. The dysfunctional economy, with its everyday contradictions and absurdities, was another source.
Despite the promise of material abundance, shortages were endemic to the socialist economy. Consumers routinely faced shortages of soap, coffee, sugar, laundry detergent, cigarettes, rubber, transportation, household appliances, cars, housing, clothing and—above all—meat. The shortages arose in part by accident. Without market-determined prices, planners were often flying blind. But shortages were also purposefully engineered by bureaucrats to solicit bribes from rationed consumers.
The only legal way that people could get what they wanted was to wait in line—sometimes for weeks on end. And even then, thugs could jump the queue. Those who didn’t want to wait would resort to bribery and the black market. Even socialist planners and factory leaders had to use the black market to meet their targets in the Five-Year plans. People commodified their relationships, using friends and family to supply them with what the socialist economy would not. This gave rise to what was called “an economy of favours” and the saying that “One must have, not a hundred rubles, but a hundred friends.”
The political scientists John Clark and Aaron Wildavsky describe the dynamic:
When the need for social or political contacts to accomplish anything—from getting enough steel in order to meet one’s factory’s plan quota to finding chocolate for a child’s birthday party—become indispensable… human relations suffer. People expect both too much and too little from friends, family, and acquaintances: too much, since almost every aspect of your life depends on what others can do for you; too little, since the instrumentalization of these relations means that they are sucked dry of any inherent pleasure.
The anthropologist Janine Wedel describes the effect on a Polish woman who manipulated her connections to obtain curtains: “[She] feels a kind of revengeful pride—she is happy to manipulate a system that has humiliated her all her life.”
As we put it in our Poland book: “The new socialist man was not the selfless creature of Marxist writing. He was a grifter who had no choice but to make his way by cheating the rest of society, just as the rest of society cheated him.”
It’s a common trope that capitalism corrupts. Anyone who has spent time with our species knows that we can be avaricious, materialist and selfish. Tempting as it may be to think that socialism would make us better, it seemed to make us worse.
The communist revolution sought to reshape the economy by giving government control over the means of production. But socialist revolutionaries had more than the economy in their sights. They aimed for nothing less than an extreme makeover of human nature. Unfortunately, actual socialism seemed to make people worse, not better.
Why did socialists seek to change man?
Marx believed that “the essence of man” was “no abstraction inherent in each single individual.” Instead, this essence was “the ensemble of the social relations.” And by changing social relations, he believed man could be changed for the better.
For his part, Stalin saw that certain aspects of human nature were stumbling blocks to the socialist dream. In 1935 he told a conference of collective farm labourers that “a person is a person. He wants to own something for himself.” It will “take a long time yet to rework the psychology of the human being, to reeducate people to live collectively.”
But Stalin and others believed that, given enough time, socialism would create what they called the “New Socialist Man.” He would be intelligent, healthy, muscular, selfless and supremely dedicated to the cause. Basically, he’d look like everyone in the socialist “realist” paintings that the government compelled artists to paint.
He would care less about his private life and his family and more about society-at-large. It was in this vein that Soviet education theorists taught that “By loving a child, the family turns him into an egotistical being, encouraging him to see himself as the centre of the universe.” In the place of such “egoistic love” the state encouraged “rational love” of the broader “social family.”
Socialists had a practical reason for remaking man. Without economic freedom, citizens had little incentive to produce. In a capitalist society, Adam Smith’s butcher, brewer and baker serve us dinner because they are incentivized to do so; it puts money in their pockets and food in the bellies of their children. But in a state-run canteen the workers were paid whether they served decent food or not. The socialists hoped that by remaking human nature—by creating a New Socialist Man motivated to serve others and not just himself and his family—they could solve this incentive problem.
How did people change?
As I’ve explained in an earlier post, the incentive problem was never solved. The New Socialist Man never got very good at serving others, so socialist societies were systematically poor.
But what happened to human nature? Did they succeed in changing it? The species evolves over generations so, of course, the seven-decade socialist experiment didn’t alter human genes (when Marx sent a copy of Das Kapital to Charles Darwin, it apparently sat unread on Darwin’s shelf). But socialism did have a profound effect on cultural norms and attitudes. And these changes were almost entirely for the worse.
In my book on Poland with Pete Boettke and Konstantin Zhukov, we quote one Pole from the late-1980s who observed: “one can make a generalization that everybody in Poland who has the chance engages in a good deal of stealing, cheating, and supplementing his or her income by illegal means.”
Another complained: “Why must I so often do things to get a promotion or improve my family’s living standard that run against my conscience? Why and how has it become true that I am a swine? When did I realize it, and when did I stop caring?”
Socialist planners also worried about cultural decline: “What is going to happen to the character of the young generation,” a state planner asked, “if from the very beginning of their working career in the enterprise, they are being taught and morally forced to cheat at the expense of the whole society?”
In our Estonia book, we quote Václav Havel, the poet-playwright-dissident who became Czechoslovakia’s last president. He identified the problem in his New Year’s address of 1990:
We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities… I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact, and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all—though naturally to differing extents— responsible for the operation of totalitarian machinery, none of us is just its victims; we are all also its cocreators.
Even Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev complained in his autobiography of “a gradual erosion of the ideological and moral values of our people.”
Why was the New Socialist Man a worse man?
The control problem is one explanation for this gradual erosion of moral values. With no carrots in the form of market incentives, socialist leaders deployed a terrifying array of sticks—mass deportation, widespread surveillance, arrests and slave labour. They even weaponized children against their parents (a topic I plan to cover in a future post). And since the socialist revolution was built around the notion of class warfare, the socialists felt justified in using these sticks against any class that stood in their way: kulaks, capitalists, ethnic minorities, nationalists, internationalists, left deviationists, right deviationists, religious leaders, cultural icons and intellectuals.
In the face of such widespread terror, it’s no wonder that the socialist state bread cultural habits of anger and distrust. But terror was not the only source of cultural rot. The dysfunctional economy, with its everyday contradictions and absurdities, was another source.
Despite the promise of material abundance, shortages were endemic to the socialist economy. Consumers routinely faced shortages of soap, coffee, sugar, laundry detergent, cigarettes, rubber, transportation, household appliances, cars, housing, clothing and—above all—meat. The shortages arose in part by accident. Without market-determined prices, planners were often flying blind. But shortages were also purposefully engineered by bureaucrats to solicit bribes from rationed consumers.
The only legal way that people could get what they wanted was to wait in line—sometimes for weeks on end. And even then, thugs could jump the queue. Those who didn’t want to wait would resort to bribery and the black market. Even socialist planners and factory leaders had to use the black market to meet their targets in the Five-Year plans. People commodified their relationships, using friends and family to supply them with what the socialist economy would not. This gave rise to what was called “an economy of favours” and the saying that “One must have, not a hundred rubles, but a hundred friends.”
The political scientists John Clark and Aaron Wildavsky describe the dynamic:
When the need for social or political contacts to accomplish anything—from getting enough steel in order to meet one’s factory’s plan quota to finding chocolate for a child’s birthday party—become indispensable… human relations suffer. People expect both too much and too little from friends, family, and acquaintances: too much, since almost every aspect of your life depends on what others can do for you; too little, since the instrumentalization of these relations means that they are sucked dry of any inherent pleasure.
The anthropologist Janine Wedel describes the effect on a Polish woman who manipulated her connections to obtain curtains: “[She] feels a kind of revengeful pride—she is happy to manipulate a system that has humiliated her all her life.”
As we put it in our Poland book: “The new socialist man was not the selfless creature of Marxist writing. He was a grifter who had no choice but to make his way by cheating the rest of society, just as the rest of society cheated him.”
Automotive
Electric cars just another poor climate policy

From the Fraser Institute
The electric car is widely seen as a symbol of a simple, clean solution to climate change. In reality, it’s inefficient, reliant on massive subsidies, and leaves behind a trail of pollution and death that is seldom acknowledged.
We are constantly reminded by climate activists and politicians that electric cars are cleaner, cheaper, and better. Canada and many other countries have promised to prohibit the sale of new gas and diesel cars within a decade. But if electric cars are really so good, why would we need to ban the alternatives?
And why has Canada needed to subsidize each electric car with a minimum $5,000 from the federal government and more from provincial governments to get them bought? Many people are not sold on the idea of an electric car because they worry about having to plan out where and when to recharge. They don’t want to wait for an uncomfortable amount of time while recharging; they don’t want to pay significantly more for the electric car and then see its used-car value decline much faster. For people not privileged to own their own house, recharging is a real challenge. Surveys show that only 15 per cent of Canadians and 11 per cent of Americans want to buy an electric car.
The main environmental selling point of an electric car is that it doesn’t pollute. It is true that its engine doesn’t produce any CO₂ while driving, but it still emits carbon in other ways. Manufacturing the car generates emissions—especially producing the battery which requires a large amount of energy, mostly achieved with coal in China. So even when an electric car is being recharged with clean power in BC, over its lifetime it will emit about one-third of an equivalent gasoline car. When recharged in Alberta, it will emit almost three-quarters.
In some parts of the world, like India, so much of the power comes from coal that electric cars end up emitting more CO₂ than gasoline cars. Across the world, on average, the International Energy Agency estimates that an electric car using the global average mix of power sources over its lifetime will emit nearly half as much CO₂ as a gasoline-driven car, saving about 22 tonnes of CO₂.
But using an electric car to cut emissions is incredibly ineffective. On America’s longest-established carbon trading system, you could buy 22 tonnes of carbon emission cuts for about $660 (US$460). Yet, Ottawa is subsidizing every electric car to the tune of $5,000 or nearly ten times as much, which increases even more if provincial subsidies are included. And since about half of those electrical vehicles would have been bought anyway, it is likely that Canada has spent nearly twenty-times too much cutting CO₂ with electric cars than it could have. To put it differently, Canada could have cut twenty-times more CO₂ for the same amount of money.
Moreover, all these estimates assume that electric cars are driven as far as gasoline cars. They are not. In the US, nine-in-ten households with an electric car actually have one, two or more non-electric cars, with most including an SUV, truck or minivan. Moreover, the electric car is usually driven less than half as much as the other vehicles, which means the CO₂ emission reduction is much smaller. Subsidized electric cars are typically a ‘second’ car for rich people to show off their environmental credentials.
Electric cars are also 320–440 kilograms heavier than equivalent gasoline cars because of their enormous batteries. This means they will wear down roads faster, and cost societies more. They will also cause more air pollution by shredding more particulates from tire and road wear along with their brakes. Now, gasoline cars also pollute through combustion, but electric cars in total pollute more, both from tire and road wear and from forcing more power stations online, often the most polluting ones. The latest meta-study shows that overall electric cars are worse on particulate air pollution. Another study found that in two-thirds of US states, electric cars cause more of the most dangerous particulate air pollution than gasoline-powered cars.
These heavy electric cars are also more dangerous when involved in accidents, because heavy cars more often kill the other party. A study in Nature shows that in total, heavier electric cars will cause so many more deaths that the toll could outweigh the total climate benefits from reduced CO₂ emissions.
Many pundits suggest electric car sales will dominate gasoline cars within a few decades, but the reality is starkly different. A 2023-estimate from the Biden Administration shows that even in 2050, more than two-thirds of all cars globally will still be powered by gas or diesel.
Source: US Energy Information Administration, reference scenario, October 2023
Fossil fuel cars, vast majority is gasoline, also some diesel, all light duty vehicles, the remaining % is mostly LPG.
Electric vehicles will only take over when innovation has made them better and cheaper for real. For now, electric cars run not mostly on electricity but on bad policy and subsidies, costing hundreds of billions of dollars, blocking consumers from choosing the cars they want, and achieving virtually nothing for climate change.
2025 Federal Election
Fixing Canada’s immigration system should be next government’s top priority

From the Fraser Institute
Whichever party forms government after the April 28 election must put Canada’s broken immigration system at the top of the to-do list.
This country has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates. Were it not for immigration, our population would soon start to decline, just as it’s declining in dozens of other low-fertility countries around the world.
To avoid the social and economic tensions of an aging and declining population, the federal government should re-establish an immigration system that combines a high intake with strictly enforced regulations. Once Canadians see that program in place and working, public support for immigration should return.
Canada’s total fertility rate (the number of children, on average, a woman will have in her lifetime) has been declining, with the odd blip here and there, since the 1960s. In 1972, it fell below the replacement rate of 2.1.
According to Statistics Canada, the country’s fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.26 in 2023. That puts us in the company of other lowest-low fertility countries such as Italy (1.21), Japan (1.26) and South Korea (0.82).
Those three countries are all losing population. But Canada’s population continues to grow, with immigrants replacing the babies who aren’t born. The problem is that, in the years that followed the COVID-19 lockdowns, the population grew too much.
The Liberal government was unhappy that the pandemic had forced Canada to restrict immigration and concerned about post-pandemic labour shortages. To compensate, Ottawa set a target of 500,000 new permanent residents for 2025, double the already-high intake of about 250,000 a year that had served as a benchmark for the Conservative government of Stephen Harper and the Liberal governments of Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien.
Ottawa also loosened restrictions on temporary foreign worker permits and the admission of foreign students to colleges and universities. Both populations quickly exploded.
Employers preferred hiring workers from overseas rather than paying higher wages for native-born workers. Community colleges swelled their ranks with international students who were also issued work permits. Private colleges—Immigration Minister Marc Miller called them “puppy mills”—sprang up that offered no real education at all.
At the same time, the number of asylum claimants in Canada skyrocketed due to troubles overseas and relaxed entry procedures, reaching a total of 457,285 in 2024.
On January 1 of this year, Statistics Canada estimated that there were more than three million temporary residents in the country, pushing Canada’s population up above 41.5 million.
Their presence worsened housing shortages, suppressed wages and increased unemployment among younger workers. The public became alarmed at the huge influx of foreign residents.
For the first time in a quarter century, according to an Environics poll, a majority of Canadians believed there were too many immigrants coming into Canada.
Some may argue that the solution to Canada’s demographic challenges lie in adopting family-friendly policies that encourage couples to have children. But while governments improve parental supports and filter policies through a family-friendly lens—for example, houses with backyards are more family-friendly than high-rise towers—no government has been able to reverse declining fertility back up to the replacement rate of 2.1.
The steps to repairing Canada’s immigration mess lie in returning to first principles.
According to Statistics Canada, there were about 300,000 international students at postsecondary institutions when the Liberals came to power in 2015. Let’s return to those levels.
The temporary foreign worker program should be toughened up. The government recently implemented stricter Labour Market Impact Assessments, but even stricter rules may be needed to ensure that foreign workers are only brought in when local labour markets cannot meet employer needs, while paying workers a living wage.
New legislation should ensure that only asylum claimants who can demonstrate they are at risk of persecution or other harm in their home country are given refuge in Canada, and that the process for assessing claims is fair, swift and final. If necessary, the government should consider employing the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause to protect such legislation from court challenges.
Finally, the government should admit fewer permanent residents under the family reunification stream and more from the economic stream. And the total admitted should be kept to around 1 per cent of the total population. That would still permit an extremely robust intake of about 450,000 new Canadians each year.
Restoring public confidence in Canada’s immigration system will take much longer than it took to undermine that confidence. But there can be no higher priority for the federal government. The country’s demographic future is at stake.
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