Churchill is credited, among a great many others, with the quip that Christopher Columbus was the first socialist: he did not know where he was going, did not know where he was, and did it all at the taxpayer's expense

Churchill is credited, among a great many others, with the quip that Christopher Columbus was the first socialist: he did not know where he was going, did not know where he was, and did it all at the taxpayer's expense. The sole point of the remark seems to be to exalt the modern European socialists, who are set beside a great figure. In any case, this apocryphal quotation is not very accurate: Columbus, a former privateer and an experienced seafarer, meant to reach one of the ports of China, probably Guangzhou, and in the end his expedition became the most important investment of the millennium rather than a socialist fiasco, and, incidentally, it was funded from the personal means of the Crown, not from taxpayers' money