This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 11, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Its defenders say that socialism is, if not better at delivering basic material wealth to humanity is at least morally veteran James Audison takes issue with several arguments for socialism over capitalism in his new book,

The End of Socialism.

When you read GA Coans, why not socialism, what did you find compelling about it if not within the

within the text itself but from the response

uh... that it received

well it received quite a

celebrated response uh... and justly so. G.A. Cohen was a distinguished

political philosopher for many years and had been a defender both a defender of

socialism of various kinds and a deep and thoughtful critic of

libertarianism. This was his last book. It turned out to be his last book. He

passed away shortly after it was published and although it's very small it's really just an extended

essay in some sense it was his final statement of the position about why

socialism is if not if not a practicable system of political economy at least a moral one

and indeed morally superior to capitalism all right so what and this this formed

the basis of the inspiration for your book that's right so

what occurred to me after reading his book and thinking about the arguments he

makes is that many people I think share the sentiment that socialism is indeed morally

superior to capitalism in itself at least in its ideals even if it's as Cohen says infeasible, that's the word he uses.

And so what I wanted to do is to explore that question.

First of all, what really is the feasibility of socialism,

...