Generational Dynamics World View

[Warren Dew]

(10-26-2017, 01:45 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote:

(10-25-2017, 11:54 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: >   On the other hand, Xi does believe that the party can control the
>   people.  After all Mao did it during the revolution, and again in
>   the cultural revolution.

I'm sure Xi also remembers Mao's Great Leap Forward, in which the
"revolution" went completely out of control, and tens of millions of
people were executed or starved to death.  It was a total Socialist
disaster.

** 16-Sep-10 News -- Cuba's seismic shift has global implications
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/x...tm#e100916

Sure, that's another example which Xi probably views as showing that the party can control the populace.

Quote:

(10-25-2017, 11:54 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: >   Except that, as you point out, any actual socialism in China has
>   already fallen apart, and China has been more capitalist than the
>   US for a couple of decades now.

I have no idea how you measure that.  Do you have some numeric measure
to back this up?

Government spending as a percentage of GDP is a good measure, with some allowance for price controls.  Government spending in the US is a little under half the GDP, while in China it is a little over a quarter, and price controls are largely limited to utilities in both countries, so China is pretty clearly more capitalist.

I haven't been able to find the same number for Nazi Germany, though it seems to be in the neighborhood of a half, certainly considerably more than modern China.  More importantly, the Nazi regime took over effective managerial control of much of German industry, so much of supposedly private industry was actually government controlled; accounting for that would bring the figure up well above one half.

Quote:The point that I was trying to make is that pure Socialism is
mathematically impossible, and pure Capitalism is politically
impossible.  There's very likely some universal constant representing
the percentage of the country's GDP under regulatory control, and that
roughly the same percentage applies to both nominally Socialist and
nominally Capitalist societies.

Roughly the same number applies to modern social democracies and modern capitalist democracies, yes; the US and European countries hover around one half.  That wasn't true in the 1930s, though.  In the 1930s, there were still truly socialist countries, not just wimpy social democracies; in addition to Nazi Germany there was the Soviet Union, which like Communist China under Mao was almost fully socialist, with the number close to one.  Yes, they were doomed eventually to collapse, but that process took decades.

From an economic standpoint, the US is closer to Nazi Germany than China is.  From a political standpoint, China is closer, since the US isn't authoritarian, but socialism is an economic attribute, not a political one.