"Communism would have worked, if the Soviet Union had only tried it for real." I must have heard this argument a dozen times from die-hard leftist friends. Marxist economists such as Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick even wrote a book making exactly this claim.

No doubt, true believers will be just as unwavering in the face of Venezuela's collapse. That country, which embarked on a misguided "Bolivarian revolution" under Hugo Chavez and his successors, has imploded almost as spectacularly as the Soviet Union — the country is in such dire straits that the government is now calling for forced labor. Yet there will be many who claim that the dramatic reversal of what some on the left hailed as an economic miracle just a few years ago tells us nothing about the efficacy of socialist revolutions.

This demonstrates that for any political-economic ideology, there is always a hard core of believers who will never waver in their conviction that if only the program were tried in its pure form, it would succeed. Any failures — even debacles on a grand scale, including the fiasco of 20th century communism — will be chalked up to ideological impurity and improper application.