The aphorism is right: the good ideas do need to be relearned every generation. Just three short decades after the Berlin Wall fell, we’re sitting amidst a revival of enthusiasm for “socialism.” Various organizations report that a rising tide of young people view socialism favorably, and it’s into this reality that Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell step to remind readers that Socialism Sucks.

I’ve been friends with the authors for a very long time, and they are accomplished and prolific producers of the kind of dry, academic treatment for which economists are (in)famous. This book, however, is most certainly not what you would get at a university seminar or in a conference room at the annual meeting of a professional scholarly organization. Picking up Socialism Sucks is like walking into the middle of the conversation at the hotel bar after a long day at one of those conferences, after everyone has had a few drinks. The language gets a bit salty and some of the jokes are crude and corny, but perhaps you should expect nothing less from a book subtitled Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World.

The authors’ message is fundamentally no different from what one might glean by reading their academic work, albeit by reading it through a pair of strong beer goggles. They warn readers early that this isn’t a normal academic book and “if that offends you, you can put this book down and read one of our boring academic journal articles instead. It will make the same points but without the local color.” I recommend that you keep reading the book.

Sweden doesn’t suck / The book begins with a spicy foreword from libertarian firebrand Tom Woods and an introduction that finds our authors drinking “excellent but highly taxed Belgian beer in Sweden.” That this is an introduction and not an actual chapter is important, and that’s reflected in its title: “Not Socialism: Sweden.” It’s a clarifying exercise as much as anything. When neo-socialists look at Sweden and say “socialism works,” they’re not actually talking about socialism. Sweden doesn’t get its own actual chapter in a book about socialism because Sweden isn’t actually socialist. It’s a robust free-market economy that has high taxes and a big welfare state. It’s not a society in which the state owns and manages the means of production.

Lawson is one of the principal investigators compiling the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World Index. According to the index, Sweden and its Nordic neighbors are solidly free-market countries. They have high taxes, big welfare states, and heavily regulated labor markets compared to the United States, but they perform very well on other free-market margins like the quality of their legal system and the security of Swedish property rights, access to sound money, freedom to trade internationally, and regulatory burden.

As Lawson and Powell note, Sweden became a rich country by liberalizing. As late as 1950, Swedish taxes as a percentage of gross domestic product were 19%, lower than in the United States and elsewhere in Europe. The size of the Swedish government exploded between 1960 and 1980, and it fell from fourth-richest country in the developed world in 1970 to 14th richest in 2000.

Seeing socialism / If you can’t find real socialism in Sweden, then where is it? Here is where Lawson and Powell begin vigorously and enthusiastically drinking their way through the unfree world, with stops in Venezuela to see “Starving Socialism,” Cuba to see “Subsistence Socialism,” and North Korea to see “Dark Socialism.” (Well, actually, the authors didn’t enter North Korea, but rather visited the Chinese side of the Korean border to learn about life next door; they had promised their wives they wouldn’t be killed or imprisoned on the trip.) They also visited China to see “Fake Socialism,” Russia and Ukraine to see “Hungover Socialism,” Georgia (the country, not the state) to see “New Capitalism,” and finally a socialism conference in Chicago where they wanted to find out why, exactly, self-described American socialists like socialism and what they mean by the term.

Along the way, their boozy adventures show how socialism sucks. Bearded neo-socialist enthusiasts for local craft microbrews might rethink their enthusiasm upon realizing that there are only two kinds of beer in Cuba. (On the other hand, Bernie Sanders has said he worries that Americans have too many choices in deodorant, so maybe two is the right number of beers for socialists.) Georgia, their last stop before heading back to the United States, has a unique regional wine tradition that was almost completely destroyed by communism, but it has experienced a resurgence as economic freedom has increased.

It’s easy to get conned by romantic visions of socialist paradise. Socialist reality is different. The authors’ trip to Cuba is an excellent illustration. The Cuban government is filled with canny propagandists who are good at putting on a wonderful show for rich tourists, including noting that Havana’s Hotel Nacional is “reportedly one of the world’s great hotels.” But the authors want to get behind the curtain, so to speak, and have a look at the grittier reality of Cuban socialism. What they find is depressing: (again) only two kinds of beer, rotting and decrepit hotel rooms, and bland food even in the legal private restaurants. The reason for that last finding is that the proprietors still have to source their meats, vegetables, and spices through the government. Lawson and Powell highlight the difference between Cuban cuisine in Miami’s Little Havana — which is excellent — and Cuban cuisine in actual Havana — which sucks.

They also address the “whatabouts” common to any defense of socialism, e.g., access to health care, education, etc. For this they use a summary of research by Powell and coauthors Gilbert Bertine and Vincent Geloso in which they take a critical look at Cuba’s vaunted life expectancy and infant mortality numbers. First, communist regimes can and do improve these metrics by sheer brute force: they pour resources into health care, for example. Second, the data are misleading. Abortion rates, for example, are very, very high, and a lot of high-risk pregnancies are terminated (presumably under pressure from health officials) lest they ultimately be carried to term where they can adversely affect the health statistics.

Socialism, American style / The book ends with our authors doing more field research (and drinking) at a conference in Chicago organized by the International Socialist Organization. They noted the thriving black market of unregistered vendors selling t‑shirts, knick-knacks, and calendars, as well as the absence of “a clear definition of what constituted socialism.” The apparent incoherence was underscored “when at one point early in the rally, most of the people in the room started a spontaneous, ‘Free abortion on demand. We can do it. Yes, we can,’ chant that lasted a good minute or two.” Lawson and Powell point out that while socialist countries have high abortion rates, “abortion is not exactly a central pillar of a socialist system” and therefore “an odd item to draw such enthusiasm.”

In their conversations with attendees, the authors learn that a lot of the people there were drawn from environmental and abortion-rights activism and seemed to be united not by socialism per se but by their position to the left of the Democratic Party’s mainstream. Or, as the authors put it, “Many of the conference attendees we asked thought socialism meant simply aspiring toward a world with better conditions for various marginalized groups.” By that definition, Lawson and Powell are socialists. I’m a socialist. The staff of the Cato Institute and the readers of Regulation are socialists. It’s a definition devoid of meaning.

It’s here that the authors — and Lawson in particular in his work on the Economic Freedom of the World Index — do an especially valuable service by highlighting the slipperiness of the meaning of “socialism,” which seems to change based on who is in power and which regimes are doing well. The right, obviously, did no one any favors by crying “Socialism!” every time Barack Obama said anything. American intellectuals, academics, and celebrities hailed Venezuela as a socialist success story, a proof-of-concept for the better world that would follow la revolución, and they wrote fawning obituaries for Hugo Chavez after his death in 2013. Then, all of a sudden, Venezuela became “not real socialism” once it started falling apart. The Revolution apparently will not be televised on the basis of things as trivial as clear theory, carefully collected evidence, and on-the-ground observations.

The conviction that socialism can and will work, it appears, is immune to evidence. That problem will only get worse as the horrors of the Soviet gulags and the mass starvation of China’s Great Leap Forward and the Ukrainian Holodomor recede into history.

Socialism Sucks may not succeed as an exercise in persuasion. As some reviewers have pointed out, it probably won’t appeal to people who aren’t already on the authors’ “side.” But as George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan has noted, this may not detract from the book’s value. It is a useful reminder for people who are already broadly sympathetic to the libertarian worldview that for all of the ways actually-existing, actually-practiced “capitalism” falls short of perfect, we can thank God it’s not socialism.