The Man Who Told the Truth

Robert Heilbronner, a lifelong socialiist, was able to admit that capitalism is a success where socialism has every where proved to be a failure. He famously wrote in 1989 that "Mises (the ardent free market economist whose books form an intellectual bulwark against socialism) was right." He even admitted the following:

Capitalism has been as unmistakable a success as socialism has been a failure. Here is the part that's hard to swallow. It has been the Friedmans, Hayeks, and von Miseses who have maintained that capitalism would flourish and that socialism would develop incurable ailments. All three have regarded capitalism as the 'natural' system of free men; all have maintained that left to its own devices capitalism would achieve material growth more successfully than any other system. From [my samplings] I draw the following discomforting generalization: The farther to the right one looks, the more prescient has been the historical foresight; the farther to the left, the less so.

He also noted then that "democratic liberties have not yet appeared, except fleetingly, in any nation that has declared itself to be fundamentally anticapitalist."