For some ungodly reason there are people who refuse to admit that central planning is always catastrophic. It may be as has been said that those people always envision themselves as running a totalitarian regime rather than living under one. It was catastrophic in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe where it may take decades or even centuries to undo the harm done by Communist Party mismanagement. And, as noted by the editors of the Washington Post, it has been a catastrophe in China where the full horror of the catastrophe is yet to be fully realized:
DRAMATIC HUMAN catastrophes, engineered by the Communist Party, punctuated the 30 years following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949: A bloody intervention in the Korean War; manmade famine during the “Great Leap Forwardâ€; the Cultural Revolution. After the rise of more pragmatic Communist leaders in 1979, China settled down (with the notable exception of Tiananmen Square in 1989) and got on with the business of economic growth. Abuse of state power hardly ended, though; it simply took less spectacular form. The “one child†policy, which created havoc one family at a time, epitomized this period.
Read the whole thing. In my view the only people who can laud the CCP’s actions are those who hate the Chinese people or, possibly, human life in general.
I think you should say always catastrophic eventually. History is replete with examples of kingdoms that functioned well, by the standards of the times, with central planning when the leaders were better, smarter or whatever, but only for a while. The way I look at it is that things really are much better in China than they were 40 years ago, but they are probably nearing an upper limit with things as they currently function.
Even if China rejects communism, what happens? Do they become Russia? In general it seems to me that the former communist countries are not flourishing even once they give up communism. I am not sure what that means. Charitably, I think it may mean that it takes a long time to reform human capital. Not so charitably, I think communism mostly took hold in problem countries that are likely to kind of suck no matter their form of government.
Steve
The way I look at it is that a) the Chinese economy 40 years ago was as bad as it was because of centralized planning; b) liberalizing the Chinese economy would have improved things more without the centralized planning; c) the misallocation of resources over the last half dozen to a dozen years have made things worse than they otherwise would be.
Economies that are flat on their backs due to mismanagement improve despite centralized planning not because of it.
The stuff that Tom Friedman has been lauding were harbingers of China’s problems rather than the signs of the skill and genius of China’s leaders that he took them for.
As long as you do not have to live in the shitholes your policies create, there is no problem. You simply build a brick wall around your neighborhood to keep out the riff-raff, and to deal with intruders, you hire thugs and give them badges.
Russia changed from one totalitarian state to another. In Czarist Russia, all power was vested in the Czar and nobody else. Depending upon how strong he was, he would claim ownership of all land in Russia, and he could seize wealth at will. The Russian citizens had no rights, and any documents signed by a weak Czar were rescinded by the next strong one.
Nicholas II was weak. He revived the Duma, and he was giving other rights to the people. (Note: He did not create the Duma.) Whether these would have become permanent is questionable. Alexei was sheltered because of his hemophilia, but this may have caused him to overcompensate as an authoritarian, brutally if necessary.
If I am not mistaken, China had been totalitarian or authoritarian.
An authoritarian state that accomplishes the goals of efficient and productive central planning is fascist Germany. Fascist Italy was an improvement, but it was not as successful as Germany. Genocide is not a component of fascism. Fascism is simply private ownership with government control of production and everything else. Sound familiar?
At some point in the central plan, humans become cogs in a machine. They are no longer afforded a soul. They are reduced to the level of a draft animal. When a mule or sheep dog becomes too much trouble, you get rid of it, and when people are mules and sheep dogs, you get rid of them.
Here’s the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of fascism:
That may not be necessarily genocidal but it is, shall we say, highly conducive to it.
“It may be as has been said that those people always envision themselves as running a totalitarian regime rather than living under one.”
People who back big government plans usually derive some kind benefit from the vastness of central planning’s social programs. Consequently, it’s support often stems from either a survivalist mentality of “they’re screwing us so why not take them down a peg a two.” Or, from limousine liberals in needing to throw money at the underprivileged in order to assuage the income inequality present in their own financial comfort zones — lives oozing with wealth and privilege.
Of course the “they,” in most central planning advocates’ minds, is usually some unknown face, who nonetheless is darkly painted as a scrooge-like, soulless figure, personified by the republican party. Such “bad guy” symbols have become deeply embedded caricatures in our society, resulting in a growing segment of an incurious electorate to mindlessly deflect the source as well as the solution to problems onto someone else. It takes no serious analysis to do this — almost like taking a basket weaving class in school!
Thus, we have cultivated executive branches of government with no accountability (who can get reelected under the clouds of a bad economic record), a public who only sees their own party’s ideology as being the right one, as well as a large segment of society who is relatively unaware of living under what is being mandated, and imposed upon so many, by a powerful government. It’s only when some of these people opt to start a small business, own some land or property, become even mildly successful where they fall into a “rich” taxation category, or fail to adjust their speech to accommodate the latest PC guidelines that people begin to scratch their heads, and maybe even rethink and/or regret some of their former conclusions as to what works and is unselectively fair, versus what doesn’t work and is merely selectively fair.
You’re conflating methods with organizing principles. The Soviet Union was a catastrophe because its society was ordered on collectivist ideology, not because collectivist methods were utilized to achieve economic goals. We see the same problem with market ideology in which society is atomized and disconnected, resulting in compounding inefficiencies and negative externalities.
Neither collectivism nor market fetishism are workable principles on which to organize a society. They must be used as necessary for optimal social welfare, often in conjunction.
Fascism is often mistaken for National Socialism, and the mistake could be done mistakenly or deliberate. There is no racial component to fascism. It is bolted on because it was a component of German National Socialism. Fascism is centered upon the state, and therefore, the nation’s wellbeing is paramount.
If the word “fascism” causes consternation, it could be changed to steeplism.
All totalitarian states could engage in genocide, but they do not. (This is not an endorsement.)
Many people have tried to define fascism. They all disagree a bit. I suspect that we can’t quite capture the feelings of that ra so it is hard to understand. I think Dave’s citation is as good as any, though I would note that in some definitions, and indeed with every fascist government I can think of offhand, there was also an idealization of a past time in that country’s history and the fascists used that as an idea towards which they (supposedly) worked. Since that is universally associated, or nearly, with fascism, I would add it in. YMMV.
Steve