I keep meeting young evangelicals who tell me how wonderful life would be if the government ran health care, and if the government regulated energy development and consumption. Well, there are countries where the government runs everything – like Venezuela and North Korea. What’s it like to live there?

The radically-leftist New York Times has an interesting story about what it’s like to live in a socialist country, where the government owns everything.

Excerpt:

North Korean troops fired on a fellow soldier who was defecting to South Korea on Monday across the heavily armed border dividing the countries, South Korean officials said, amid heightened tensions over the North’s nuclear weapons program.

The soldier was shot but succeeded in reaching the South, its military said in a statement.

The North Korean soldier defected through Panmunjom, a village that straddles the border between the two Koreas. Alerted by gunshots, South Korean guards found the North Korean soldier about 55 yards south of the border line that bisects Panmunjom. He was taken to a hospital with gunshot wounds to an elbow and shoulder, South Korean officials said.

[…]The defector drove a vehicle toward the border line inside Panmunjom, and then left the vehicle, running south while he was fired upon by other North Korean soldiers, according to the American-led United Nations Command, which oversees the 1953 armistice that halted the Korean War.

He took cover near a building on the southern side of the Joint Security Area in Panmunjom before South Korean and American troops came to his aid and took him to a hospital, the command said in a statement.

The Joint Security Area, which is 35 miles north of Seoul, the capital, was established after North Korea and its Communist ally China signed the armistice with the United Nations Command, which fought on South Korea’s behalf.

The area is the only place along the border where troops from North and South Korea face off, separated from each other by only a few feet.

A North Korean soldier last defected at the heavily guarded location in 2007.

More than 30,000 North Koreans have fled to the South since a widespread famine hit the impoverished North in the late 1990s. Nearly all of them have traveled through China. But a few North Korean soldiers and civilians have defected by crossing the 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone, which is guarded by minefields, sentry posts and tall fences topped with barbed wire, some electrified.

In 2012, a North Korean soldier scaled three barbed-wire fences to defect to the South. That same year, another North Korean soldier fled across the border after killing his platoon and squadron leaders. In 2015, after walking across the border, a North Korean soldier told South Korean investigators that he was fleeing widespread beatings and other abuse within his military barracks.

[…]In 1984, a gunfight erupted at Panmunjom when a citizen from what was then the Soviet Union dashed across the border to defect to the West. North Korean troops opened fire to stop him, and South Korean border guards fired back. One South Korean soldier and three North Korean border guards were killed.

My editors told me not to turn this post into another negative screed against stupid millennials, but to instead offer some encouraging words of advice on how they can educate themselves.

The first thing to realize is that all of your public school teachers are idiots – especially the ones who teach non-STEM classes. Education school degrees are the easiest degrees to get at college. They have the lowest entrance requirements, and the ed school students learn material that is fit for high school English classes. It’s a great degree for low-IQ people who dropped out of math in high school. So you can’t trust your public school teachers to teach you anything about civics or economics. If you were indoctrinated by your teachers to hate the free enterprise system, then you were lied to and indoctrinated. You will have to teach yourself, on your own.

For history, a good one-volume book is “A Patriot’s History of the United States” by Larry Schweikhart.

For economics, anything by Thomas Sowell is worth reading, but you might be better off starting out with “The Vision of the Anointed“, “Basic Economics“. “Economic Facts and Fallacies” and “Intellectuals and Society“. The nice thing about Thomas Sowell is that he does studies of economic policies that have been tried in different countries during different time periods, so you learn a lot about history as well.

Finally, the reason that there is a North and South Korea, and not just a North Korea, is because American, British and Australian forces beat back an unprovoked invasion by the North Koreans in 1950. This was probably the most moral war that the United States has ever engaged in, in the history of the United States. We shed our blood and spent our treasure to protect South Korea from becoming one large concentration camp – which is what North Korea is. If you’d like to read a good book about the Korean War, I highly recommend “The Frozen Hours“, a historical novel by Jeff Shaara.