It is hard to find a book that in so few pages gives you a complete account of what socialism is today. Thomas J. DiLorenzo did it by synthesizing the ideas, the facts and the omnipresence of this malevolent doctrine, which is not an easy task. Socialism works as a maze that is always on progress so you cannot completely encompass it. When you believe that you found the layout, another corridor appears.Just sixteen chapters were necessary to cover the topic in its most recurring manifestations. The chapters are brief and the total time of reading is about three hours, but here and there you feel the temptation of underlining some sentence or quote, delaying the final. This is the case, for instance, of the public interest theory of regulation, which far from one believes "is usually the result of lobbying by industry (and sometimes unions) to stifle or eliminate competition."Although the book dedicates part of chapter five to talk about the victims of communism, the core of the work is not that topic but the presence of the doctrine today in most of democratic states. Socialism has pervaded not only governments, it is present in any single manifestation of human culture, from art, to music, to literature, to theater, to movies. It is impossible to surpass it, to rid of it, and this is in part because socialism appeals rather to emotions than reasons. This book gives you reasons, it doesn't make you cry or laugh, but it also gives you stimulating examples of entrepreneurs like John D. Rockefeller or Cornelius Vanderbilt, who based on knowledge and imagination jumped over the limitations imposed by the factors of land, capital and labor.As I said, socialism is living with us, is not a museum artifact. Is right here under the disguise of a democratic state, and it shows its claws whenever a regulation, a minimum wage, a health system, appear: "In the foreword to the 1976 edition of his famous book, The road to Serfdom, Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek wrote that the definition of 'socialism' evolved in the twentieth century to mean income redistribution in pursuit of 'equality,' not through government ownership of the means of production but through the institutions of the welfare state and the 'progressive' income tax. [So, the author says, t]he means may have changed, but the ostensible end--equality--remained the same."Well, "The problem with socialism" helps you see through the veil. In fact, and despite that the examples are centered almost exclusively in the U.S. history, as a Chilean reader I can say that nowadays we are suffering from first class socialism, and in every case ("onerous taxes, regulations, the welfare state, inflation," you name it) we have a version of this monster in charge. So in times, the book is also talking about us.Far from being dead, socialism has only changed in the surface. That's why, I guess, DiLorenzo dedicated the book "to all the victims of socialism--past, present, and future."And future, remember.Highly recommended.