Diario de Cristobal Colon (the Diary of Christopher Columbus) Book

As a novel, this book isn't much. That isn't a mark against it, though - the story serves as a light frame to build an explanation of socialism around, and it does that very well.

Looking Backward is the best and clearest way I have ever seen socialism presented (although that is not hard, since I have never seen socialism presented in any light other than a negative one), and in almost every way it seems better than capitalism.

It raises questions in me that I have never had occasion to consider. Why, indeed, should we not all work together? Why should one have so much more than another, when all people are created equal? Why waste so much manpower and economic power with endless duplication of enterprise? Why should many of us live under constant threat of poverty and hunger, when the good earth is rich, and can support us all equally?

Five hundred million people live in poverty in Africa, one of the poorest regions on Earth. Two hundred million in China. Fifteen million in the United Kingdom. Forty million people live in poverty even in America, the richest nation on Earth. This past year the people on the Forbes 400 list have accumulated an additional two hundred billion dollars ($200,000,000,000), while at the same time median family income in America dropped by 4 percent.

After reading this book, perhaps I might call myself a socialist.


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For thirty years I had lived among them, and yet I seemed to have never noted before how drawn and anxious were their faces, of the rich as of the poor, the refined, acute faces of the educated as well as the dull masks of the ignorant. And well it might be so, for I saw now, as never before I had seen so plainly, that each as he walked constantly turned to catch the whispers of a spectre at his ear, the spectre of Uncertainty. "Do your work never so well," the spectre was whispering, - "rise early and toil till late, rob cunningly or serve faithfully, you shall never know security. Rich you may be now and still come to poverty at last. Leave never so much wealth to your children, you cannot buy the assurance that your son may not be the servant of your servant, or that your daughter will not have to sell herself for bread."