November 21, 2004

• State of Kerala in India?
• Kerala is more capitalist and socialist than communist.
• This article says that China is actually fascist.
• It was never possible to practice a pure communism, assuming you mean what is normally understood by that word. Attempts to go in that direction have always come "with a unhealthy dose of totalitarian governance" and always will, because people are not by nature disposed to give up what's theirs for the alleged good of all mankind. If a given person feels like doing so, fine, but once he decides he's got to make everybody do so, he's on the road to the Gulag. I'd say North Korea is the closest thing to a surviving (barely) exemplar of communism.
• Are we talking about communism as "from each according to his ability to each according to his need" or communism as totalitarianism?
• There aren't any, and never have been for the reasons languagehat gives. The only exceptions that come to mind are groups smaller than countries. Some communes have managed to make that kind of selfless sharing work but I can't think of any that have grown and prospered taking that road.
• Captain, I'd be happy to hear about both "from each according to his ability to each according to his need" communism as well as communism as totalitarianism. Totalitarianism isn't necessarily paired with communism. There are plenty of capitalistic totalitarian governments. As far a smaller groups, you could posit that several religious communities like the shakers, early mormons, many catholic religious orders and the kibitzes of Israel are/were communes. But what countries that still call themselves communist really are?
• Do the Nepalese rebels count as Communist or Maoist? Because, short of serious Chinese & seriously stepped up Indian intervention, they're going to be in charge shortly...
• Scandanavian countries don't have many rich people. Taxation feeds much of their "cradle to the grave" setup. Totalitarianism != communism. Look at the United States, for example, which grows more fascist by the day, and has a pretty cutthroat, capitalist socioeconomic system.
• Off-topic: Don't worry, I know it looks bad, but it'll get better, even if we have to do it ourselves.
• France has a legitimate, mainstream communist party. After WWII, it was pretty strong, and participated in government. However, it has declined since 1980. Back it the day, it was pretty close to Moscow.
• Vietnam is also a communist state though I believe North Korea is the most hard core nasty style of communism. China is probably the one we should fear the most though. The mere fact of their imposing superpower status threatens us in ways the Soviet empire never did. They are only making overtures of niceness to the US to slowly bleed our economy dry. It won't be too long before they will be making the demands of us without much opportunity to bargain our way out.
• (Wikipedia article) -- There were also strong communist parties elsewhere in western Europe, as in Italy (as seen in 1900)
• I don't think that communism is really working worldwide. Socialism, however, is. Look at Canada, Sweden, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, etc. Also look at our own U.S. military. It actually is a socialist system if you look at it closely. Fascism, however is definitly on the rise in our country, and in Russia, China, India, etc. I just don't really think there are any truly communist countries out there... Instead there's been a lot of 'monster under the bed' labels applied to scare populations to embrace fascism as a counter.
• Australia = socialist country? Jesus.
• Wolof Could you bring me up to speed re Australia is not socialist? Sign me as 'Curious Monkey'
• Well, it's got a capitalist economy which is prodded along by a right-wing pro-business government, just for starters.
• Wolof Yeah, I was a bit disappointed in the last Australian election. Really made me wonder...
• I guess this is a bit diversionary, but what countries out there are successfully socialist? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
• You were a bit disappointed? I was distraught.
• Fuck! I wau got you beat Wolof. I have the boobie prize president, GWB.
• It's not diversionary when you bring in all the people who think "communist == socialist" and brand you a wacko regardless of which you say you support...
• way
• Speaking for my own experience here in Seattle, the day after the election I was walking around the different neighborhoods here, Ravenna, U-District, Broadway, Downtown and the overall feeling I got was a deep and traumatic shock from almost everyone I saw or talked to on the street. It was like 9-11 happened all over again. I think whatever illusion this country had that it had an effective democracy was ripped off the eyes of everyone I could see in Seattle that day.
• What? Did I fart? There's been no comments here for awhile...
• To clarify a bit more - are we talking communism as in Marxist communism, Leninist communism, Maoist communism, Jake "Slasher" McGurk communism, or what? Marxist communism ain't never happened - each attempted revolution kind of stalled at the "dictatorship of the proletariat" stage. Marx saw this as an essential (but emphatically temporary) stage on the way to a communist state. Every time it's been tried out, though, first of all the "of the proletariat" bit gets thrown out (thanks, Stalin!), and then it... well, it never really moves beyond the "dictatorship" bit. Funny, that. Also, I'm not aware of any communist revolution that's actually taken place in the sort of industrialised economy that Marx said it should (with concentrated centres of the proletariat, hence the development of true class consciousness, yadda yadda yadda). Russia, China, Cuba, N. Korea - all still largely agrarian countries at the time of revolution. So, no Marxist communism has ever been tried on any large scale, no. Smaller scale communism? Well, quite a few Spanish socialists gave it a go round about the civil war. Didn't get very far. Um. South and Central America? Er. A bit, maybe. I don't know quite where Zapatisseries, Che and the like fit on the communist scale. Chavez in Venezuala? Bonkers in the nut, divisive, popular, corrupt as bollocks (but not actually as bad as the people he kicked out), and the victim of several CIA-backed coup attempts - everything you look for in a communist leader, but not actually, I fear, a communist. (I would encourage someone who actually knows what they're talking about to jump in here, by the way. That might be good.) Could it ever work? Nah, probably not. Might be nice to see it tried, but given we're only just getting round to giving a few Keynesian whatnots a go, I'll not be holding my breath....
• It's all really complicated. I don't know a lot about the U.S.S.R., but I do know a bit about China. In China, there has never been communism in the way we think about it. Between 1950 and 1976, it was State directed and owned capitalism - that is, industries were nationalised, but the workers all received different pay, had their own possessions, etc - and schools had even tuition and boarding fees, and health care was payed for by your employer. In fact, throughout the Mao period, there was great economic disparity in China, especially between rural and urban workers. Since 1976, things have been privatising, and trade has increased the per capita income, but the disparity between urban and rural is just as great, if not greater. The countryside has not seen any of the boom that places like Shanghai have. So that's my knowledge of a "communist" country - a place that was communist in name only. The only sucessful communism I have ever heard about has been on the commune level - and every family/household, after all, is organised on communist principles (to each according to their need - you don't stint the baby just because it's not off getting a job). But never larger than a few hundred - and I think it has to do with the size of the "Monkeysphere" of the human brain (see the next post). Communal living works at a personal level, but not beyond that. There are lots of reasons - emotionally, people find it impossible to relate to such a large group, and most of all, economies are so complicated that human brains cannot organise them. The current market economy is inefficient and very cruel, but it is the only thing we have, unless we get a hell of a lot smarter.
• Bear in mind, Wolof, that to people in the USA, better than appallingly funded public school and health systems are socialism.
• There's truth in what languagehat says and especially what flashboy says; but what I wish more people understood (yes, I know, I'm being arrogant) is that as of yet we're not nearly smart enough to direct an entire economy. It just doesn't work that well. I suppose that a society could probably bootstrap off of a huge amount of accumulated wealth (and enabling technology) and run with a huge portion of inefficiency and still be relatively prosperous. Maybe. But I truly believe that the deeper problem here is that most people vastly underestimate the complexity of a national economy. I'm a market capitalist in the same sense as Churchill supported democracy ("It's the worst form of government except for all the others"), not because of ideology. I'm not wedded to the idea of property at capitalist countries understand it. I'm all for a more socially just way that actually creates wealth. But, for the moment, in my opinion that's a slightly socialistic market economy and not much more is presently possible. But I think the biggest thing you should get out of this thread isn't so much languagehat's point, or even mine, as much as (I suppose the classic leftist defense of marxism) that it's never really been done the way that it's "supposed" to be done. I accept a lot of languagehat's point; but I'm actually more cynical about the totalitarian impulse in people that want to be political leaders than I am of the general people's ability to put the good of all before just their own good. But I'm pretty damn cynical about that, too. But when I look at communist countries, I see without fail (but I'm no historian) charismatic leaders that hijack the process and move right to pure totalitarianism. China's reforming away from it, but they're still a lot closer to communism than capitalism. And, I think it's inarguable that Communism has dramatically raised the living standards of the Chinese (notwithstanding some of Mao's attempts to destroy them in the name of raising them) and I'd say that in a very real sense, communism has been most successful in China. I'm pretty convinced that by about the middle of this century, China will become the US of its era, and I think that's great. I mean, we're talking a billion freaking people. We here in the US are a mere 300 million who've been calling the shots in a world of 6 billion. I say, go, China.
• "To me the idea of communism always made sense." Oh dear.
• I see what kmellis is saying, but what bothers me is that no one in charge appears to want to.
• Bear in mind, Wolof, that to people in the USA, better than appallingly funded public school and health systems are socialism. Sure, (although I'd say "some people" rather than "people"), but I don't want to reinforce that degraded discourse by acknowledging it.
• kmellis: IT WASN'T MAO IT WAS HIS WIFE!@# OR LIN BIAO, DEPENDING ON WHO YOU BELIEVE.
• (and how you romanize)
• So, in the end, Keynes wins? Even though the social-democrats seem on the losing side these days?
• From my perspective, the economics argument has largely been settled. I mean, Keynes was hardly a socialist. Market capitalism has largely won the day, though I think it's clear that even the US, the laggard, is adopting certain economic policies to increase social justice. The important point is that the European economies, and hopefully a portion of the American left, understand that there's not an easy answer, a free lunch, for doing so. I think there definitely is an efficiency cost; but, really, compared to even sixty years ago in the US, the market economy is not so red in the tooth and the nail. I think the marxists and socialists vastly underestimated the complexity of a large national economy, and forty years ago there was more of an unrealistic desire to have a very productive highly state regulated economy. The European economies, from my point of view, are acknowledging that uncomfortable reality by backing away from it, but it's hardly the case the the essentialy European economic ethos doesn't place a high value of economic and social justice, and they're willing to pay for it. Which I think is quite right. So, yeah, Keynes wins. Keynes took a bit of a beating with some of the Chicago school stuff, but I think by now it's all started to sort itself out. These days, from my lay perspective, "real" economists pretty much figure that Keynes and Friedman are right.

• I think there definitely is an efficiency cost

  THe US healthcare system is an excellent counterpoint to that assertion. Costs more, does less. Also, I'll note that to my way of thinking there are two orthogonal axis that are often conflated: capitalism vs socialism and command vs demand economies. "Communist" China is still a command economy, to a very large extend. The US is a capitalist society, but has had (and still has) problems with trusts and monopolies creating privately owned command economies. Ownership is one thing; freedom of markets is another. david: Thank you for your useful and non-snarky contribution to the discussion.
• There has never been a Marxist state. Lenin's Russia was the closest we got to it, but it was unstable, as was demonstrated by Stalin's coup. I think Marx misinterpreted human nature. Those people willing to lead a revolt are the same people who are unwilling to relinquish power.
• Oh, and discussing communism with Merkins is tiresome: there has been so much propaganda in the US that they generally don't know truth from lies.
• The US healthcare system is an excellent counterpoint to that assertion. Costs more, does less. I am in no way defending the US health care system, but there's two answers to this contention. The first is that you've made a logical fallacy, right? What I said doesn't imply that your assertion isn't true. So it's not a counterpoint. :) But I also am of the opinion that the US health system isn't a market, either. This is a bit tautological, but I think that "market" in the modern sense only really has meaning when it functions as a "market" is required to function in the modern sense. But this system (US health care) doesn't, it's badly broken, so in my view it's not really a "market". However, as is often noted, there's a bunch of reasons why any health care system is unlikely to properly function as a market, since people are very far from being rational consumers of health care. I'm being a little intentionally provocative to make a point when I say this, but I often tell people that I'd prefer it if the US system was either a single payer system or a truly privatized, pay-as-you-go system. I think what we have here now is almost the worst of all possible worlds. Well, that's an exageration, because no health care at all is obviously worse. But my mind boggles at the enormous amounts of wealth that the US system manages to consume/waste. The fact that it's tolerated at all indicates, of course firstly that Americans are more cold-hearted on this matter; but, also, that we're tremendously wealthy to be able to afford to throw wealth away like we do without becoming poor. On your second point, I completely agree and I'm sorry to have done my part in perpetuating that confusion. I did try to deal with it indirectly by pointing out that I support market economics for pragmatic, wealth-creation reasons, and certainly not for principled, private-property reasons. That sort of points the way to your distinction: private property doesn't imply market economics, and neither does a command economy imply a lack of private property. But you see how people incorrectly think the terms involved are, um, transitive, because you made the same kind of mistake with your assertion of a counter-example. :)
• I think that shrik makes the best point when he says that the people who desire and gravitate towards power do not want ot let it go. What is required to rise up and lead communism in its infancy stages is wholly inconsistent with what sort of person you would want leading the movement. Perhaps it is not too different from what is going on in US politics now. It is increasingly difficult to be successful in US elected politics without sucking up big-time to large corporations and accept contributions which are, essentially, bribes. The people who are idealistic are not going to participate in that system for years to finally rise to the top. And the people that do participate in that system are not able to effectively break away from it to effectively rule for the people. In that way, I would say that our version of democracy and communism are very similar: they both have pre-requisites for leadership which are completely inconsistent with the attributes of competent leadership.
• As languagehat and others have noted, the very idea of a "practical communism" is an oxymoron, as it ignores human nature. In particular, it makes no allowance for the role of incentives - in all but the smallest communities in which everyone knows anyone else, what incentive other than fear of punishment can anyone possibly have to do any more work than the absolute minimum, when "to each according to his needs" guarantees that one will be rewarded no more and no less regardless of the effort one puts in? And how does one pick out the shirkers in a state of millions without an all-pervasive network of spies looking over everyone's shoulder? Totalitarianism is in the very nature of communism, not just some accidental feature that happens to be historically associated with it. "in the USA, better than appallingly funded public school and health systems" The funny thing is, the USA spends more per student on high school education than all but 4 other countries in the world, and is no. 1 in terms of both percentage of GDP and absolute amount spent on healthcare. The shortcomings of American secondary education and healthcare have nothing to do with "funding", and everything to do with - you guessed it - messed-up incentive systems. Anyone serious about improving America's public education system will have to take a serious look at injecting some competition into it, and that means (shudder) vouchers.
• Then again is the US considered a democracy? I am less inclined to think so lately.
• The funny thing is, the USA spends more per student on high school education than all but 4 other countries in the world, and is no. 1 in terms of both percentage of GDP and absolute amount spent on healthcare. The shortcomings of American secondary education and healthcare have nothing to do with "funding", and everything to do with - you guessed it - messed-up incentive systems. Anyone serious about improving America's public education system will have to take a serious look at injecting some competition into it, and that means (shudder) vouchers. Actually, the numbers are misleading when you look at per-pupil spending in urban, suburban, and rural areas. Suburban schoolchildren receive highly disproportionate resources because of the localized way that taxation is redistributed to schools. Urban and rural areas do not receive nearly the same per-pupil funding. Vouchers do nothing to address this, other than being a kickback to religious organizations as an exchange for votes. There are reasons for separation of church and state.
• The problem isn't necessarily "human nature," as appealing to that is one of our hoariest fallacies. The two biggest problems with communism are that a) it has to be voluntary, and b) that it has to be international. On the first point, that was the whole "revolutionary consciousness" argument that led Cuba to be, for a while, a fairly suddenly advanced country relative to its history. The US has done a hell of a job making sure that communism won't work by our rhetoric allowing Castro to be more authoritarian in defiance of our threat. Under that paradigm, the broad progress of society was the reward that everyone got for working together, and it worked splendidly for a bit, then OK for a while, then collapsed after the USSR fell and Cuba had no trading partners. Which sort of brings us to the second problem: internationality. Since class antagonism is the central motivator of a drive for communism, communism has only succeeded when workers see no nationalist distinction, but rather all work for the good of the globe. This doctrine fell under Stalin, who saw himself in "capitalist encirclement." And remember, the ultimate goal of communism is the "withering away" of the state due to everyone's ability to work for the common good. This is part of the totalizing force behind communism, whereas arguments like Goedel's show a poor grasp of the theory behind communism. It's not totalitarian because you need enforcement devices; in the ultimate Marxist model you need no state to enforce social norms. It's important to note that while the USSR showed signs of becoming totalitarian under Lenin (the idea of "permanent revolution"), it was Stalin's renuncement of internationalism and his ideological purges that made the Soviets totalitarian. Further, for people like Goedel, it's important to remember that "the market" can be seen as a totalizing force as well. There are some parts of human endeavor where efficiency is not and should not be the main goal, and areas where "competition" is not a panacea no matter what the neo-liberals say. For example, to take his schools argument, charter schools perform on the whole worse than public schools (at least as of 2003, when the Department of Education decided it was no longer going to track those statistics). The answer isn't some vague "well, if there are vouchers, there'll be more choice, and people will use rational self interest to the profit of the system." The answer, at least for public schools, is smaller classes with more teachers and more emphasis on critical thinking. Teacher-to-student ratio pretty much is the best predictor of test scores and academic success. But honestly, the system as it stands now is geared toward efficiency: you get a baseline diploma for the most number of children, rather than the inefficient method that would promote more learning but cost much more. To toss out the simplistic answer of "incentives" ignores how many different variables go into teaching, and how little choice there really is for people of lower incomes. (But enough with that).
• Bernockle- It's important to remember that both Fascism and Communism are post-democratic movements, meaning that they're based on mass mobilization but eschew the governance of democracy for different reasons (in Communism, democracy is seen as a tool of perpetuating class difference to the advantage of the merchants; in Fascism, democracy's pluralism is directly at odds with a pure national identity). In the end though, you can say Marxism never worked because it's never been tried. If it ever does happen, look for it to come out of the United States after economic disaster that leaves huge numbers of young men unemployed and angry. (Oh, that and one of my pet peeves is that people discount Marxism because of the failure of communism, not as a political project but in the most valuble context Marxism provides: a theory of historical analysis. That's really why Marx should be studied, because his great leap was allowing history to be analyzed from a perspective of class antagonism, not because he actually had any tremendously workable prescriptions for politics).
• There are reasons to like the idea of communism, but I think in practice you'll find that most of the positive aspects of communism (egalitarianism, the communalism) have been co-opted successfully by socialist countries, even as far as the USA is socialist. And communist countries have generally failed to take proper care of their common well-being, so that in the end a socialist country is more virtuous than a communist one. I hardly think that repression of free speech (the Prague Spring and Tienanmen Square come to mind) benefits the community as a whole, and I've read many heart-rending stories recently about the plight of the poor in North Korea and China. In my opinion the difference comes down to democracy or the lack thereof. Where a socialist government is combined with a capitalist market, even the small details of the communal well-being are attended to -- in Canada we're getting worked up about waiting times for MRIs, meanwhile in North Korea the government makes itself fat while the population starves. Capitalism, in my opinion, succeeds not because of incentives for success or the fear of failure, but because it puts the power in the hands of individuals to create and address needs. The government shouldn't be trusted to deal with that sort of thing -- it concentrates power too much, and government can't respond quickly enough to changes in supply and demand.
• Urban and rural areas do not receive nearly the same per-pupil funding. Washington D.C. is the second best funded school district in the country, with per capita expenditure of ~ $15,000 per student, and yet it has second most atrocious results in America. How does funding explain that? Why do Minnesota and Iowa manage to do so much better with two-thirds of the expenditure made on D.C. students? Why do American students perform so poorly on international comparisons of literacy, scientific knowledge and mathematical skill, if funding is at issue? Do you realize that even the worst funded school districts in America are better funded than typical schools in most of the developed world? Vouchers do nothing to address this, other than being a kickback to religious organizations as an exchange for votes. There are reasons for separation of church and state. Your church and state argument is groundless. Not only has the Supreme Court found such arguments spurious, but if taken seriously it would mean that federal money ought to be withheld from schools like Yeshiva University or Georgetown. The constitution clearly says that no religion shall be treated as established - i.e, favored over any other - not that federal largesse may not be utilized in religious schools. The fact is that there is plenty of research out there on vouchers (here's some for starters), and it supports what elementary economic reasoning would tell one: that people and organizations perform better when they have competition. All the talk of "kickbacks to religious organizations" only serves to obscure the reality that teachers' unions are currently the Democratic Party's biggest backer, and the one thing they detest more than anything else is meaningful competition that threatens the careers of deadweights. The "kickback" argument is nothing more than a projection of what liberal anti-voucher advocates are doing unto their opposition.
• Vouchers are pork barrel kickbacks to religious organizations. If you think non-denominational private schools are going to take in poor "voucher kids" from off the street, you are kidding yourself. Vouchers will show favoritism towards Christian Right private schools, who are always chomping at the bit to get this pork barrel legislation passed. And if you think a born-again Christian who thinks he has a mandate is going to let his religious agenda get hijacked by Muslim schools, you are kidding yourself yet again. For rich families who already send their kids to private school, this is just the equivalent of yet another tax break for them, granted to families who do not need it. Here's this for a novel idea: fix the mechanism by which taxes fund schools. When schools are funded equally, when public schools aren't falling apart and have computers and modern textbooks, when neighborhoods don't look like Iraqi war zones and kids have the mental space to study, and when kids aren't becoming parents at 15 or 16 because we can't teach them sex education, then you can blame the unions.
• The new communists are the environmentalists!
• I accept a lot of languagehat's point; but I'm actually more cynical about the totalitarian impulse in people that want to be political leaders than I am of the general people's ability to put the good of all before just their own good. So am I -- that's one reason I'm an anarchist. And, I think it's inarguable that Communism has dramatically raised the living standards of the Chinese... and I'd say that in a very real sense, communism has been most successful in China. Oh dear. You sound like my brother. Look, it would have been virtually impossible for any government less nihilistic than, say, the Khmer Rouge to fail to preside over a dramatic increase in living standards starting from the primitive and war-ravaged base of 1940s China. It's absurd to give Mao's government the credit for that; in fact, as you parenthetically note, they did their best to retard progress with the insanities of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Do you not see that almost any other government (say, the KMT government that took Taiwan to unprecedented prosperity over the same time period) would have done far better? China has prospered (to the extent that it has, which is less than people dazzled by propaganda believe if you look beyond the big cities) in spite of, not because of, communism. The two biggest problems with communism are that a) it has to be voluntary, and b) that it has to be international. On the first point, that was the whole "revolutionary consciousness" argument that led Cuba to be, for a while, a fairly suddenly advanced country relative to its history... Under that paradigm, the broad progress of society was the reward that everyone got for working together, and it worked splendidly for a bit... I don't know whether to laugh or cry. The idea that Cuban (or any other) communism was ever "voluntary" is not only false but repellent. But I've given up arguing with apologists for communism; there's no reward but increased blood pressure.
• supports what elementary economic reasoning would tell one: that people and organizations perform better when they have competition. But sadly not what real-life experience demonstrates; as, for just one example, Britain's Thatcher and Major-era privatisation experiments (and many of the Blair/Brown Public Private Partnership schemes) demonstrate. In some areas, undeniably there has been an improvement in efficiency (although often at the expense of jobs and communities, sometimes disastrously so). But in others - most notably in our rail system, and PPP hospitals - history gives the lie to such casual blanket statements. The inefficiency argument against monopolistic state control is undeniable, if often wildly overstated. But there is an equal inefficiency argument about state-mandated markets in the provision of services. If competition is introduced, then that inherently implies 'winners' and 'losers' - more precisely, a spectrum of quality. Now either one makes the case that it is acceptable for some citizens to have poor quality services - in which case, what decides who these citizens will be? And why were we having the argument in the first place? - or, in order to provide an acceptable quality of service, you will need significant over-capacity in the system, to allow the substandard service providers to be eliminated. And, ba-boom! Inefficiency. (The argument against complete removal of state involvement in service provision, of course, is not an efficiency argument, but a moral argument. ) Also, we're not talking about communism any more. On preview: languagehat is talking about communism.
• Vouchers are pork barrel kickbacks to religious organizations. If you think non-denominational private schools are going to take in poor "voucher kids" from off the street, you are kidding yourself. Argument by assertion has never been very convincing, and it's obvious you haven't even bothered to so much as glance at the research I provided a link to. As for your "private schools won't take in poor voucher kids" argument, tell that to my (poor, black) friends from college who went to just such schools on the "A Better Chance" voucher program. Here's this for a novel idea: fix the mechanism by which taxes fund schools. When schools are funded equally, when public schools aren't falling apart and have computers and modern textbooks, when neighborhoods don't look like Iraqi war zones and kids have the mental space to study, and when kids aren't becoming parents at 15 or 16 because we can't teach them sex education, then you can blame the unions. Plenty of emotive rhetoric, but absolutely nothing by way of counter-evidence or substantive reasoning to explain the lack of a discernable relationship between school funding and test results. I see I'm wasting my time; you already "know" what must be true, and you won't let a few facts get in your way. What's saddening is that so many children are having their futures sacrificed on the alter of other people's irrational attachment to failed dogmas - which makes it not so different from communism in the end.
• It's absurd to give Mao's government the credit for that; in fact, as you parenthetically note, they did their best to retard progress with the insanities of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. I may be buying Beijing's propaganda hook, line and sinker, but weren't the errors of the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution caused by Mao being a self-delusional dictator that went through second-in-commands like it was going out of style?
• Mao's being a self-delusional dictator certainly made the situation worse, but it would have been bad under any government that thought it could direct the market better than the market could direct itself. Cf. Lenin's being forced to introduce elements of capitalism (under the rubric of the New Economic Policy) to save Russia from the disasters of the Civil War.
• kmellis hits on just about the most important issue, the inabilty to organised things as crazy as markets. Attempts to do so result in tragedies, like the Great Leap Forward. (On preview: also what lh said.) As for China, languagehat is right that anything after decades of war would have been better, though I don't know that I agree that the KMT/GMD would have been better than the CCP. They were crueller in mainland China than the Communists in the 1940s before they were ousted, and in Taiwan faced an extremely different situation (smaller population, less extreme landholding disparity?, already with industrial investment by Japan and with continued input of investment from the US), while the CCP had to deal with the massive population and poverty of the mainland. I think, other than peace, land reform was the most significant move by the CCP that increased quality of life in the early 1950s, something the GMD was against. Both parties continued to be dictatorships, with similar suppressions of free speech, and massacres of their enemies. Any attempt to decide between them (in terms of political freedom), prior to the 1980s liberalisation in Taiwan, would be like trying to decide whether the electric chair or gas injection would be more pleasant. Goedel: Children will do poorly in education whereever their parents are poor, ill-educated, and they are more worried about what they did or did not eat for breakfast than they are about the class. My mother studied childhood literacy - the best determinant is not amount spent or quality of schools, but parental literacy. And lack of breakfast lowers IQs. Competition in schools will do nothing to solve the base causes. And as flashboy points out, privatisation may at time be more "efficient" if one only measures it in terms of money laid out, but that always comes at a loss of service or a degredation of service. As has been shown repeatedly and occaisionally fatally throughout the world; economic theory is just theory, this is real life. That said, I measure efficiency by how close is what you put in to what you get out (and this is how efficiency should be measured) -- in which case Canada's public health care (for one example) is kicking the US private system's ass. We get more for our dollar in health care, as opposed to admin cost.
• But sadly not what real-life experience demonstrates; as, for just one example, Britain's Thatcher and Major-era privatisation experiments (and many of the Blair/Brown Public Private Partnership schemes) demonstrate. Oh really, like what exactly? You don't mean British Telecom, do you? Telecoms services have never been cheaper or better? Do you mean airlines? British Airways makes money, unlike most European airlines, and it provides great service doing so. How about British Gas? Gas prices have been falling in real terms - at least until the Iraq War drove them back up. Where exactly are these cases we should "sadly" look upon? In some areas, undeniably there has been an improvement in efficiency (although often at the expense of jobs and communities, sometimes disastrously so). That bit about "at the expense of jobs and communities" refuses to acknowledge that change must often come at some cost. If there were no jobs being destroyed, who would fill the ones being created? Do you really believe that working oneself into an early grave in a coal-mine is better than working at a call-center? British unemployment levels are the envy of continental Europe, and thanks to Thatcher's reforms, British economic performance has outshone that of France, Italy and Germany for the last decade and a half. There is no law of the universe that commands us to throw money down the whole to preserve "communities" that have ceased to be economically viable, and it's a dead certainty that the individuals who constitute the communities you mention are much better off in the aggregate today than they were before Thatcher came into office. But in others - most notably in our rail system, and PPP hospitals - history gives the lie to such casual blanket statements. I hope you know what "natural monopolies" are, and why railway lines fall into that category while schools do not. I also hope you appreciate that Blair's PPP hospital scheme was watered down to meaninglessness thanks to Labour party opposition; the German medical system shows that privately run hospitals with the freedom to raise and dispense with funds as they please are perfectly compatible with top-notch healthcare. "The inefficiency argument against monopolistic state control is undeniable, if often wildly overstated." Do you have any numbers to support the charge that it is "often wildly overstated"? I don't put much faith in mere assertions, if you've noticed, especially not when they go against the substantial amounts of data I've seen that contradict them. If competition is introduced, then that inherently implies 'winners' and 'losers' - more precisely, a spectrum of quality. Now either one makes the case that it is acceptable for some citizens to have poor quality services - in which case, what decides who these citizens will be? And why were we having the argument in the first place? - or, in order to provide an acceptable quality of service, you will need significant over-capacity in the system, to allow the substandard service providers to be eliminated. And, ba-boom! Inefficiency. One could use this self same argument to argue for the abolition of all markets whatsoever. The notion that markets are about maximizing static "efficiency" is utterly wrong-headed, and to see why this is so, I recommend you pick up a copy of Joseph Stiglitz' "Wither Socialism?" Markets are good because they recognize incentives, and facilitate innovation to address people's desires in ways no one might have anticipated, not because they make for the highest capacity utilization at any given point in time.
• Sorry, that last paragraph is a grammatical nightmare. Basically, take out the period before "As has been shown" and replace the next semi-colon with a period. Thank you.
• Flashboy, Finally, let me address one grave logical flaw in your argument that is easily glossed over - it simply doesn't occur to you that the amount of variation in service quality can increase even as quality rises across the board. To see what I'm getting at, consider the case of 5 hospitals, A through E, each with a quality rating of 2/10, where 1 is the lowest possible score. Suppose they're privatized and now service quality is A=4, B=5, C=6, D=8, E=9; by your reasoning, those who frequent hospital A have been made "losers", even though in absolute terms they and everyone else are much better off than they used to be. That's a pretty strange definition of "losing", isn't it? Competition in schools will do nothing to solve the base causes. JB, If competition means children get to go to schools where more of the budget is used to provide meals that ensure they can actually pay attention in class, then yes, competition will help to solve the base causes, and as an empirical matter, we already know for a fact that it does so - just follow the link I provided. Eppur si muove!
• Goedel: Privatisation in Britain's rail system has killed people. No single body was responsible for maintenance, and everyone just cut costs. It's also made the service, in general, crap. The British Rail system, once the envy of the world, is now byzatine, inefficient and expensive. Buying a ticket involves calling two or three different places. It's awful! As for how Britain's economy has preformed - it may have out "preformed" Germany and France, but it also has greater poverty, higher inequality and a lower quality of life. (Hey kids! Let's play with the CIA Factbook!) (life expectancy -- infant mortality) France: 79.44 years -- 4.31 deaths/1,000 live births GINI - 32.7 (1995) Germany: 78.54 years -- 4.2 deaths/1,000 live births GINI - 30 (1994) UK: 78.27 years -- 5.22 deaths/1,000 live births GINI - 36.8 (1995) So our lesson for today is that increased market performance =! better quality of life. It's a commonly held American myth that a better economy must help all and decrease disparity - even in the face of facts that show otherwie. (In fact, I just heard a sociologist talk about this at a colloquium the other day. Fascinating talk all about how perception of inquality in the US dropped in the late 1990s, even as that inquality increased.) Also, your hosiptal argument does not work. Privatisation means that Hospital A has a service level of 0, just like 15% of Americans who have no health care, and who face bankrupcy if they so much as get in a small accident. I have only anecdotal evidence on the fate of the NHS since Thatcher, but it sounds like it is in much worse condition than the Canadian system, which not so abused by slash and burn governments. The quality did not go up across the board. ------------------- flashboy is right - we have long ceased talking about communism. We started talking about socialist democracies, and economies in general. There is general agreement that it is impossible to organised the economy of a country, let alone the world. It is simply too complicated for a few human brains, or even machine, to comprehend. However, that does not mean that the answer is on the other extreme, complete freedom of the economy. That way leads to abuse, and the natural conglomeration of monopolies - economic dictatorship, which is no more pleasant than political dictatorship. Perhaps we should start another Curious George - What is the economy for, to serve our human needs, or we to serve its inhuman demands? What do we want for our economy - to produce the most, people and environment be damned, or to create the best life possible for the largest number of people, to fufil the basic needs of all and thus to keep opportunity open?
• Plenty of emotive rhetoric, but absolutely nothing by way of counter-evidence or substantive reasoning to explain the lack of a discernable relationship between school funding and test results. I see I'm wasting my time; you already "know" what must be true, and you won't let a few facts get in your way. You're starting off with the undemonstrated assertion that unions are the source of all ills with public education and then provide "evidence" from a Randian propagandist. Please.
• *pulls up chair beside davidmsc, shares malted-milk balls*
• And you still have not answered why school vouchers are not payback to the religious electorate.
• "I don't know whether to laugh or cry. The idea that Cuban (or any other) communism was ever "voluntary" is not only false but repellent. But I've given up arguing with apologists for communism; there's no reward but increased blood pressure." LH- Since I've been the dick in the past, I'll be calmer here, but you really show very little historical knowledge with this pronunciation. The Cuban Revolution was, by and large, a "voluntary" thing (at least as much as the American Revolution was). It started with a small group in the hills, but rapidly became a popular movement once it had control of the cities. This wasn't a coup by monied classes controlling the military (like most other regime changes in Latin America). And a large part of that popular appeal was Che Guevarra's idea of revolutionary consciousness. Sure, it's arguable that it was brainwashing, but the same argument can be applied to our public schools. The main point of it, however, was for every person involved in bringing Cuba out of wretched poverty to be able to see how their altruistic actions furthered the cause and advanced society. That was the incentive. And it worked
• Any attempt to decide between them (in terms of political freedom), prior to the 1980s liberalisation in Taiwan, would be like trying to decide whether the electric chair or gas injection would be more pleasant. jb: Absolutely; I lived in Taiwan in the '70s and have very vivid memories of how scary it was even for a relatively safe outsider. I hope it was clear I was talking exclusively about economic progress. The Cuban Revolution was, by and large, a "voluntary" thing (at least as much as the American Revolution was) js: Thanks for your polite response (especially considering I wasn't being especially polite), and I see your position is more nuanced than I had assumed. But I think we'll have to agree to differ about Cuba. Sure, the initial revolutionary impulse was popular/voluntary, just as it was in Russia (in 1905 and Feb. 1917), Iran (1906 and 1979), Vietnam (1945), and many other cases in which a repressive regime finally outlasted the patience of a long-suffering people. The crucial point is what happened afterwards: in the cases we're discussing, a popular revolution was highjacked by an authoritarian faction that used armed force to quell all opposition and then repress the people anew. This force is not always communist (in Iran 1979 it was Khomeinist), but communist parties always take this route -- there is no other for them to take. If Lenin had allowed the democratic process already in place to proceed, the Bolsheviks wouldn't have lasted six months. And if Castro had allowed genuine opposition, communism wouldn't have lasted in Cuba either. As for the sainted Che, you are aware, aren't you, that he presided over the Revolution's first firing squads and founded Cuba's "labor camp" system? The ironic thing about your "at least as much as the American Revolution was" is that the American Revolution wasn't voluntary -- the majority of the colonists were probably against it when it started, and as it progressed the loyalists who refused to go along were repressed and ultimately driven out. Revolution is not a dinner party, as someone once said.
• "And you still have not answered why school vouchers are not payback to the religious electorate." Isn't that for you to demonstrate? Aren't you familiar with the notion that the onus is on the one who makes an assertion to demonstrate it? What next, are you going to ask me to prove that pink unicorns don't exist on Pluto? Besides, even if it were true that school vouchers were "payback" for some party or another, how does that show that they're a bad idea? When you buy a hotdog and fork over your money to the vendor, he gets something out of it - is buying hotdogs therefore a bad idea? Finally, have you even bothered to take a look at the empirical evidence? I'm sure you still haven't looked at the World Bank paper even as I'm writing this. Why don't you give us your critique of its contents if you have, and actually understood what you read? "Privatisation means that Hospital A has a service level of 0" Demonstrate it. Go on, show me under what theoretical framework the entrance of competition would act to reduce a provider's incentive to provide a high quality of service; show me the empirical evidence to support it. You just flat out say it must be so, and proceed on the basis that your word will be taken as law. I'm clearly wasting my time here, as neither jp nor Alex Reynolds seem to be familiar with even the rudiments of economics, and I can't teach them the subject from first principles from within the confines of this comment box. Hopefully others will at least get something of substance from these exchanges.
• Hey goetter, pass me some of those malted milk-balls! *munch munch munch* And as far as my invaluable contribution to this discussion -- listen, any conversation that begins with someone saying that communism makes sense is doomed, doomed, doomed. Communism is (a) evil, (b) counter to human nature, (c) impractical.
• A=4, B=5, C=6, D=8, E=9 You're saying I was mistakenly assuming that economics is a zero sum game, when it's not. I wasn't saying that, but I will admit my choice of 'winners' and 'losers' was unfortunately loaded (hence the ''). But you don't address my point about overcapacity - to put it crudely, in your model, don't A and B get shut down, while C has a new management team of troubleshooters imposed to bring it up to standard? So, in fact, you actually needed F, G and maybe H as well for the apparent improvement in standards to be genuinely felt across the population. Also, you appear to deny that inequality itself is a force for ill. (There is, I believe, a considerable body of evidence to demonstrate that increased levels of inequality in a society are directly detrimental to quality of life, as jb's data suggested. Had I the time, I would go looking for it. I don't. Apologies.) And furthermore, you don't answer the point about how this inequality is to be distributed. Upon what basis does person ♣ get lovely hospital E, while person ♠ only gets hospital A? Is it randomness, contingency, choice, or what is it? And, actually, can I go back to that whole zero sum/non-zero sum thing? In a purely theoretical construct, for sure, you can wave the magic wand of competition and all the twos become fours, fives, eights and nines. But, in actual, practical terms, when A competes with E and person ♥ chooses E, how does A get better? Essentially, how does your model cope with failure? One could use this self same argument to argue for the abolition of all markets whatsoever. I know. You can. Some do. I don't. You don't have to. But you could. Do you have any numbers to support the charge that it is "often wildly overstated"? No. Overstatement is not a quantifiable commodity. I hope you know what "natural monopolies" are, and why railway lines fall into that category while schools do not. But maintainence of railway lines? Organisation and co-ordination of railway timetables? Ticket booking services, control of stations? I'm sorry, I really fail to see what point you're making (to the extent that I can't tell if you're defending railway privatisation or attacking it). I certainly appreciate that one has more choice (theoretically) over which school to send a child to than one does over which railway line to go from London to Edinburgh on. But you also must appreciate that, in real life, such a choice is often extremely limited by all manner of practical concerns. And limited markets make market theory cry. If there were no jobs being destroyed, who would fill the ones being created? Because... we've had full employment for the past 25 years? Must have missed that development, sorry. ...and it's a dead certainty that the individuals who constitute the communities you mention are much better off in the aggregate today than they were before Thatcher came into office. Are you familiar with the notion that the onus is on the one who makes an assertion to demonstrate it? Because I genuinely haven't got a clue how you can make a statement like that so blithely.
• Goedel - I don't need a theorectical framework to show that privatised health care leads to a lack of service. In fact, reliance on theorectical frameworks in the face of sheer, bald, fact is where we get ridiculous ideas like privatising health care is a good idea. I live in the U.S. I see how the health care system here is bloated, unreliable and does not serve 15% of the population. Where is the incentive to provide service to them? Where is the incentive to be more efficient with money than in the Canadian system, which they aren't? I have lived in subsidized housing which was privatised; the already appalling maintenance got worse. Where was the incentive to provide high quality service? Wait...they still got their rent money and extra money from the government not matter how many cockroaches were in the building, nor how often they shut off the water all day - there was no incentive. Where was the incentive for the rail companies who took over the train system in Britain to keep up maitenance before someone died? Uh....they didn't. I'm not sure who jp is, though I'm sure I would find his/her comments interesting, but I can tell that for someone whom you would probably say doesn't "seem to be familiar with even the rudiments of economics", I do just fine at the economic history colloquiums I attend, including in the economics department; I am writing a Ph.D. thesis that involves a great deal of economic history, but I am not interested in theory - I am interested in the effect of the market on society. I must deal with facts. You are wasting your time because you are letting your ideological adherance stand in the way of appreciating the reality of the situation. Competition can encourage more effective or efficient services, but in many sectors it also encourages cutting costs to the point of deteriorating quality of service. There are too many sectors in which a business model simply does not work, because they are not profit making sectors. It is not immediately profitable to provide health care to all, nor railway access to rural areas (or even to keep up railway maitenance) - but in our society, many of us believe that these things are more important than making money. We will make money on things we can make money on, and we spend money to make our society a better place.
• davidmsc, glad to have informed opinion. Eat as many salty chocolate balls as you can.
• Aren't you familiar with the notion that the onus is on the one who makes an assertion to demonstrate it? What next, are you going to ask me to prove that pink unicorns don't exist on Pluto? Nope, but I will ask you again to qualify your initial claim that unionized teachers have destroyed public education, which you still haven't explained, beyond to mouth the party line of unions-bad-privatization-good. I don't care you linked to a World Bank document. I do care that you linked to an author with an ideological axe to grind that is used to support a specious argument, one for which I gave you several well-understood, real-world reasons why vouchers are a bad idea.
• davidmsc: a) Communism isn't evil in itself. Totalitarism, which seems to be a side-effect of trying to implement it on countries at a time, is morally wrong. A small commune or a family living in accordance to communism, as mentioned upthread, is commendable. b) There's no such thing as human nature. c) Yes, as has been pointed upthread, trying to control a whole economy isn't a good idea.
• Human Nature Review
• Some people took phrenology seriously.
• You say that, Richer, in an argumentative way, which is unsurprising - if you would care to examine the posterior-inferior angle of your parietal bone (a small way behind the ear, and slightly elevated), I believe you shall find it unusually over-developed. This is a feature common to both great leaders of men and the disreputable class of labourers, sailors and thieves who actively seek a quarrel, and delight in the exchanging of blows or bandying of curses. We call it the Organ of Combativeness; the noble Doctor Gall termed it Selbstverteidigungsinstinkt, but we believe our classification to be more apt.
• Some people took phrenology seriously. True. My wife says I have the "bump of criminality".
• *awards flashboy Victoria Cross*
• LH- I know that the American Revolution was at best favored by only a third of the population. The point was the ironic comparison. As far as the aftermath, I agree with you that this is the central point, but would disagree that the only path is one of authoritarianism. I feel that the authoritarianism was more of a flaw of each of these political actors than a design flaw in communism itself, since comittee communism (which has never been implimented on a large scale) would have had a very different modus operandi. I also believe that in many of the cases where authoritarianism has trumped the common good that it came about because of a lack of development in the countries in which communism has been tried. If you look at the primary goals of authoritarianism, especially in China, you'll see that most of it was focused on creating a, well, "great leap forward." (Again, the irony is intentional). I do agree that communism, especially post-Lenin communism, has within it a totalizing force (the worker as sorce of worth) and that combined with authoritarianism (who can provide the fear necessary as a catalyst) is a recipe for the evils of totalitarianism. Whether Cuba or Vietnam ever became totalitarian (rather than simply despotic, with a patina of populism) is debatable. Further, the unfortunate fact is that the US pushed many governments that were socialist or open-socialist into the realm of "communism" more by forcing them to accept the Soviets as trade partners (or Chinese, in Vietnam) because their post-colonial experiments directly contradicted our interests in colonialism (eg Nicaragua). But, back to your point. I think that the reason why Castro wouldn't have lasted if he allowed for genuine opposition is the US. I think that if the US had not attempted bullshit like the Bay of Pigs, Castro would not have lasted without providing for legitimate opposition. Which is, ironically, probably the opposite of what happened in Mexico, in which the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution held power for so long because of the aid of the US, and where bureaucratic ossification prevented many of the reforms that the revolution had been fought over...
• Goedel- I just read that working paper and it, y'know, doesn't actually prove all that much except that the author favors school vouchers. He cites studies without asking any questions about their methodology, he ignores counter-claims or dismisses them with tu quoque fallacies, and he ignores the very simple fact that competition is not a panacaea. Which you do as well, I've noticed. One of the more salient points about vouchers really relates to charter schools, which (at least in Michigan) are set up to recieve public money without having the same onus of public regulation. And those schools produce scores significantly lower on every standardized test. Whether the schools are secular (usually run as student-mills) or religious (which, around here, include some hardline fundementalists who believe that girls should be taught different science than boys), as a whole they're worse than the public schools that surround them. Clearly, competition does not solve everything. The for-profit schools invest little in their infrastructure (most are in portable trailers), do not offer extra-curicular activities, and are looked down on by college admissions officers. The results of charter schools across the country are so poor that the Department of Education stopped collecting data on them this last year, after years of substandard performance. Again, competition is based on profit, not on education. The for-profit schools have no trouble turning a decent margin, but cannot seem to produce better educated children. And frankly, that should be the goal. Not ideological conformity to your competition hard-on.
• Monkeyfilter: Not ideological conformity to your competition hard-on. Well said, js, but may I request that you make more hard returns between your paragraphs? It's just easier for blind old me to read that way. Thank you.
• OK. That's a shame. I thought this thread had legs. Ah well.
• I was sad because I had no feet until I met a thread that had no legs.
• Some children in Africa don't even have thread. We must be grateful for what we are granted.