"A lie," the proverb goes, "travels halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes." Whoever first said it, the line captures why socialism persists. Ludwig von Mises refuted socialism in his book Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. Socialism still bitterly hangs on thanks to falsehoods that prey on the frustrations of many people. This disconnection from reality in Marxism is so vulnerable to scrutiny that Marx relied heavily on Hegelian dialectics to obscure the meaning of truth itself. Ignoring reality gives them temporary advantages, but we have something much stronger and more durable—the truth.

The question is simple: how does an ideology devoid of truth survive so long? Most arguments against socialism do a good job of explaining what socialism claims. Then they show what socialism gets wrong economically, morally, and philosophically. Most consider the job done and leave the argument there. But to grasp why an idea survives even through the intense scrutiny that socialism has been subjected to, we need to understand how socialism utilizes tools and techniques of persuasion to cling to political discourse. To do this we can learn some of the classical tools of arguments, how socialists use them, and how we can develop our own persuasive arguments utilizing all the techniques.

Aristotle described three appeals, known today as the rhetorical triangle. They are ethos, or the credibility of the speaker; pathos, or the values and emotions of the audience; and logos, the reasoning behind the argument. In order to construct an effective argument, all three pillars are required. In the case of socialism the primary argument is that there are two classes—an underclass they refer to as a proletariat and an overclass that refers to the bourgeois—and the reason the proletariat lacks the resources and assets of the bourgeois is because the bourgeois are stealing from them by exploitation. This argument has been discredited time and time again by many great minds. But as an example of using the three appeals to construct a persuasive argument, there's a lot to learn from Marx's rhetorical construction.