Phillip J. Bryson

Phillip J. Bryson was in Berlin in August of 1961 when the Berlin Wall was built by the German Democratic Republic. He talked with people who had escaped from East Berlin in spite of the wall. He read the newspaper reports of those who gave their lives in the attempt to reach West Berlin and liberty. Bryson returned home wondering what made it necessary for a nation to fence their people in and deny them the freedoms people cherish. The quest to find answers about Marxian socialism and its planned economy ultimately turned into a career and a lifelong study of socialist economic systems.

Bryson was interested in the national institutions and practices of socialist countries and pursued a PhD in economics at The Ohio State University. He began his teaching career as an instructor at Ohio State in 1965 and became an assistant professor at the University of Arizona in 1967. In 1988, he left Arizona to join the Marriott School Faculty of Brigham Young University. He researched and taught comparative economic systems, international economics, and the history of economic analysis. His research on socialist economies took him on several occasions to West Berlin and East Berlin (Karlshorst), Munich, Marburg, Duisburg, Vienna, London, and Moscow. As a Fulbright Fellow he did research and taught at Marburg University in the Federal Republic of Germany. As noted above, he was living in Berlin when the wall was erected and he was also attending a conference in the Reichstag in West Berlin when the wall was declared open in November of 1989. So he had the amazing personal experience of the appearance and later disappearance of the Berlin Wall.

Bryson became professor emeritus of economics in the Marriott School of Brigham Young University in 2010. In retirement, after having written seven academic books and many journal articles, Professor Bryson decided to write for the general public about the economic system of socialism, a topic to which he had devoted his entire career. He was concerned about the fiscal, social, and political implications of the socialist policy initiatives of the Obama administration. His first book for the general public was long and detailed, loaded with evidence provided from great minds who have evaluated socialism and from economic data and Bryson's personal experience. That book, Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline and the Attempted Revival in the United States, published in 2015, was an encyclopedic 950 pages. In an attempt to appeal to young socialist millennials, Bryson updated the original work by reviewing the shift leftwards of the American Democratic Party around the 2020 presidential election and the stark party platform and candidates' socialist advocacy around 2020. This time the sequel, Socialism Revealed: Why Socialism's Issues Have Never Permitted Success in a Real Economy, was geared more to people who spend much time on their electronic devices -- it is under 200 pages. Many conservative writers insist that socialist economies function poorly and severely restrict the freedoms of their people, but are not in a position to explain why it is that one must expect a socialist economy to function so poorly and lower the living standard and the liberties of socialist citizens. There are simple and understandable reasons for these frightful outcomes when one understands the basic nature and functioning of socialist economies.