Leftists always think it’ll work THIS time.

Also, socialists can point to places like Sweden as being just fine, although it’s actually not all that fine and in addition Sweden was a very different type of place to begin with.

You also might enjoy this, from Allan Bloom.

Both this quote and the Santayana quote are two ways of saying the same thing — that human nature does not change. It took me to my mid-40s to come to the realization that this is actually a really important principle and that it’s the practical purpose of studying history. If you are considering a social experiment, look to the past. Some past culture has almost certainly given it at try, and we are no smarter, more highly evolved or clever than they are. We are just like them, and if their experiment ended in disaster, it is likely that ours will too.

Now Bernie Sanders is calling for a Socialist revolution. If only there was some history to which we could turn, but obviously all previous attempts were filmed in black and white, and the people wore those drab, frumpy clothes, and they must not have been very smart or clever than us if things ended so badly for them.

And then there’s this:

“Live and learn, they say…but the difficulty seems to lie in living while you learn.”
–from Needle by Hal Clement, quoted by Robert Conquest in the introduction to Reflections on a Ravaged Century.

The implied message of Conquest’s book is that all of humanity must struggle to live while waiting for progressives to abandon their infatuation with utopian fantasies.

DirtyJobsGuy has it right, BTW. Whenever you read those stories about how far US students are behind the rest of the world in various subjects, it is mostly crap. As miserable as the knowledge of American students might be, they are far ahead of other countries. The international model is to teach a collection of older facts, but spend the time teaching the 20th C in indoctrination. They work very hard at keeping uncomfortable information out of general circulation. Europeans do not simply not know important facts, they know an alternative history that is fantasy.

Artful, you will be saddened to know that when my sons came here from Romania as teenagers, neither of them had ever heard of Queen Marie. When I tested this on adults the next time I visited, I found that almost no one in Romania had even heard of her – including many schoolteachers! Sad – probably the only good modern ruler they had.

That’s not a bug, that’s a feature!