01-06-2018, 12:35 PM
(01-05-2018, 11:12 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote:(01-04-2018, 01:21 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: > I'm thinking more of European social democrats -- not Chavez,
> Castro, Mugabe, etc. European social democrats see nothing wrong
> with capitalist success. Their socialism needs a strong private
> sector.
> Government operation of manufacturing, retail trade, and
> agriculture does not work well. That is well
> demonstrted. Countries that overthrew Commie rule or seceded from
> the USSR typically sold off the 'socialized' sector to make
> possible a social market society -- and not some Gilded-Age
> nightmare that Trump and company lust for.
> Maybe countries emerging from a feudl order and frontier societies
> need to go through the Gilded stage of development that I
> understand that Trump means in "Make America Great Again". Things
> were great for shysters, slumlords, loan-sharks, and sweatshop
> exploiter in those times. No thanks!
I notice that you didn't take this opportunity to condemn Venezuela's
leaders for their utter destruction of its economy with Socialism.
Here are two articles:
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/...-really-do
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/42...rich-lowry
The first is written by someone on the left, the second is written by
someone on the right. They both have ideological spins, but they
agree on the facts: Sweden turned to Socialism in the 1970s, but then
retrenched in the 1990s, when it became clear that Socialism was an
economic disaster.
I put Chavez (and by logical extension Maduro) in the classification with Castro and Mugabe. Enough said, I thought.
Quote:This is not a surprise. Socialism has a 100% failure record, and I've
posted the reason many times:
As I've written many times in the past, Socialism is mathematically
impossible as population grows. The number of regulators grows
exponentially faster than the population grows, so by the time you get
to, say, 50-100K people, everyone would have to be a regulator.
When you impose Socialism on an existing wealthy population, as was
done in Sweden and Venezuela, and what Bernie Sanders would like to do
to the US, then it works ok until, as Margaret Thatcher would say, the
government runs out of other people's money. Then disaster ensues.
This is for the same reason. If the population has more than, say,
100K people, then there aren't enough government regulators.
So those are the two relevant economic factors: regulators, and other
people's money. Socialism requires a steady and growing supply of
both. As soon as one or both runs out, the economy is in disaster
territory, which is where Venezuela is today.
A country can save itself from that disaster by retrenching from
Socialism -- as Sweden, Cuba and even Russia have done. North Korea
and Venezuela are what happens when the country leaders refuse to
retrench.
Socialism is the greatest economic disaster in world history. It's
much worse than Naziism or Fascism. In the last century, Socialism
has killed hundreds of millions of people. Socialism has never
succeeded, for the reasons I've given. Socialism has a 100% failure
rate, for the reasons I've given. There is literally nothing worse
than Socialism.
But monopolistic capitalism is itself a failure except at creating wealth, privilege, and power for monopolistic capitalists and their retainers. Capitalism is no better than the moral values of the capitalists. Without question, the Marxist-Leninist forms of socialism have been gross failure from economic and moral standpoints. Any ideology that puts economic gain above moral standards beyond any intellectual attack will get horrid results. Such is true both of monopolistic capitalism and Marxism-Leninism. The appeal of Marxism-Leninism was that it could rush economic growth by taking out the indulgent opulence of aristocrats and plutocrats.
One needs market mechanisms to punish irrational behavior. You may find it hard to believe that economics has taken on the characteristics of the physical sciences, as in recognizing the self-evident truth of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Economic rationality recognizes that feeding pork to pigs is a waste.
The fault with Marxism-Leninism was its rejection of a market. It failed to connect production to consumer satisfaction. Marxist-Leninist regimes produced without contemplating the value or desirability of what was produced, thus creating gluts of junk and shortages of desirable goods. Marxist-Leninist regimes could at best be about twenty years behind the times in the West in consumer technologies.
(01-04-2018, 05:39 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: > I voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries.
> I was tempted to vote for Kasich out of a dread of Demagogue Don
> until I recognized the futility of doing so.
> Demagogues, Left or Right, are similarly objectionable. All that I
> could see in Trump was an ominous quality of his style of
> governing. I regret to say that this President achieves my fears
> and nothing else.
Sanders is a much worse demagogue than Trump. At least Trump wants to
make America great again, while Sanders just wants to destroy America.
When you voted for Bernie Sanders, you were voting for Venezuela and
North Korea, not for Sweden, which has retrenched. We're all very
lucky that your vote didn't count.[/quote]
Sweden could retrench because it is a democracy with free and competitive elections, and of course civil liberties that do not now exist in North Korea (which is really an absolute monarchy, basically Saudi Arabia without Islam or wealth from oil) or Venezuela.
Make America Great Again? Do you mean as in the 1920s or the 1890s? Seventy-hour workweeks and forty-year lifespans for industrial workers as used to be the norm? No thanks. Such might appeal to people of such low levels of intellectual and moral development as Donald Trump (who isn't even a good capitalist -- he's nothing more than a rent-grabbing rentier) so long as they get their way.
I am old enough to have known people who lived in the 1920s as adults, and the only thing that they missed about the 1920s was that they were still young in the 1920s. I remember people who remember the late 1930s with some relish -- but then, things were generally getting better. People had some idea that the government was something other than the enforcer of elites. OK, the people that I knew who had lived in the 1920s were farmers, industrial workers, small businessmen, or low-level professionals (clergy, teachers, and physicians -- and physicians did not yet live much better than such people as clergy and teachers).
What really is harder is that real estate is much more expensive and commutes are longer and more expensive, the result of population growth. The only thing that I would find more pleasant about the 1920s or earlier times would be lower real-estate costs.
300 million people means higher rents and longer commutes than when America had 150 million people. No evasion of that reality is possible. We of course have better technology, especially in medicine; we have better roads (I can take a two-way 65-mile freeway trip as a minor inconvenience but would not have made the same trip on the Blood Alleys that those freeways supplanted), and of course some marvelous technologies of entertainment. Bringing back the social conditions of the 1920s or earlier on grounds that such would make the masses more self-reliant would make lifer more miserable than thins were in the 1920s. There would be more population pressure on the land.
With someone like Donald J. Trump one must practically apply a Marxist analysis to understand him. He is an extreme classist, and his objective is clearly to take from the educated middle class on behalf of the Master Class to which he belongs. He is the most despotic leader that America has known since at least George III, and he makes the corruption of Warren G. Harding and incompetence of Dubya look trivial by contrast.
Woe is it to live under a political regime that Marxist analysis well fits -- one corrupt, highly-centralized in power and economics, grossly inegalitarian, and contemptuous of working people.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
