Since the fall of the Berlin wall, few have defended actually existing communism and those few have been ripe for satire. Some claim that “true” communism has never existed and what happened instead was a form of state capitalism, some say Stalin ruined the good thing Trotsky had going, and some leftists admit that Marx as all wrong and the right path for socialism is anarchism. I should admit that many of my fellow libertarians (particularly the anti-vulgar ones) take the no-true approach, while I prefer to admit the imperfections but emphasize actually existing capitalism contrasted with actually existing socialism. I’m satisfied with the “foot vote”, but the unrepentant commies have some arguments that objective evidence of well-being supports their system.
I bring this up thanks to (Chip) Smith’s recent response to (Michael) Smith’s review of (Bradley) Smith’s autobiography as a Holocaust denier. My impression is that Holocaust deniers tend to come in varieties that would be considered right-wing, either racial/ethnic nationalists or anti-interventionist libertarians. Even the somewhat hippy-dippy anti-anti-communist Denierbud repeatedly cites Kevin MacDonald, a white nationalist who excoriates the Soviet Union and its communist apologists as Jewish plotters against white gentiles. Michael Smith is different. He strikes me as generally goofy (my guess is his site is mostly dedicated to 9/11 conspiracy theories) and thinks both Hitler and the communist dictators have been libeled (I should note that Denierbud also thinks we were sold a bill of goods on Saddam and Idi Amin). He doesn’t just think they weren’t as bad as advertised, he thinks their system was better for human flourishing than capitalism. He cites the respected (oddly) Amartya Sen on changes in mortality in China, and compares it to India. Neoliberals agree: the Gapminder folks touting the changes in China note that they concentrated on health under Mao, but shifted to wealth under Deng.
How can we explain that? Possibly the data are just bad, but then I wouldn’t have anything more to write about in this post. I noted that Robert Lindsay defended communism on health grounds previously, he believes the difference is that capitalism gives people what they want and what they want is not what they should have. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (of the notorious hotbed of pinkos known as the Hoover Institute) explained the high literacy/education rates and good health in communist regimes by saying that they acted in a self-interested and rational manner, like Mencius Moldbug’s utopia under Fnargl. Just like a farmer wants his chattel to be healthy, a slaveowner or communist dictator wants his subjects to be healthy enough to produce lots of labor. I’d been reading some of Greg Clark’s “A Farewell to Alms” recently and had another idea. Maybe the mass deaths were the reason for good health. Clark notes that life expectancy (and income) shot up in England after the Black Death. A lower population in an agricultural economy where the fixed supply of land is the main constraint on production means a higher marginal product for labor. China under Mao notoriously had a “one-child” policy which kept population down. Lindsay is right then that the “foot vote” indicates people desire things other than what communist health nuts give them, and the Chinese in particular might have wanted more fertility. So one’s opinion on communism may depend on how they view the repugnant conclusion.
October 25, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Speaking of the Jewish question,
Sailer let us filthy kikes have it with both barrels because we are supposedly the main reason the borders haven’t been closed (apparently Bush, Rove, Ted Kennedy, et al are blameless):
http://vdare.com/sailer/091025_podhoretz.htm
October 25, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Also, I believe Bob “there shall be open borders!” Bartley of Wall Street Journal fame was not Jewish.
October 25, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Also, I don’t believe the neocons were pushing the hardest for immigration amnesty – if I remember correctly, NRO was modestly against Bush’s plan while the Weekly Standard was for it.
The most enthusiastic supporters seemed to be Bush, Rove, the Chamber of Commerce, the Hispanic groups, and the Catholic Church.
October 26, 2009 at 12:36 am
China under Mao notoriously had a “one-child” policy which kept population down. Lindsay is right then that the “foot vote” indicates people desire things other than what communist health nuts give them, and the Chinese in particular might have wanted more fertility.
This is completely false. Mao encouraged the Chinese to have large families. The one-child policy was instituted 3 years after his death.
October 26, 2009 at 11:38 am
My dear Jewgar, hysterical repetition of interpretive mantras is a facet of the personna best confined to talmudic torah schools.
October 26, 2009 at 1:20 pm
It seems that all the examples cited are based along the one-volk/great leader lines.
Mao confided to Nixon that he was “quite rightwing,” and would have voted for him.
There appears to be some strong links between the illuminated Tory-Socialists like Moldbug’s hero, Metternich, and hardline-communists, (Stalin, for example.)
They were both anti-liberal, believed in orderly socialism for the good of ‘a people’ rather than ‘the people,’ and their formula appears better in retrospect than it did at the time. This is particularly true for the post-colonialist regimes which rose to power due to U.S. induced chaos. Bear in mind, that this U.S.-created chaos was rarely intentional, but it nevertheless is responsible for the rise of Saddam, and to a lesser extent Idi Amin.
For this reason Americans cannot really have a nuanced perspective on such dictators.
Saddam clearly has a lot of appeal for a humanist, as Mussolini and Hitler did, (leading to Jonah Goldberg’s continued confusion about ‘liberal fascism.’
There’s humanist’s attraction for national communism is predicated partially on transcendental-strains of liberalism which Lindsay typifies, replete with the assertive male overtones, freed from all patriarchal connotations.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is also a liberal, btw.
If you want a really non-liberal communist’s perspective, you’d have to look up Alexandre Dugin, and while he would deny being a communist to his dying breath, h
Now the downside is that despite the great leader/communistic state apparatus’s best intentions towards their volk, their central-planning and schools, don’t often work out all that well.
There’ve been bloody-thirsty neo-cons who’ve suggested that war, (the cold war in particular) is good for capitolism, science and technology.
One might propose an alternative theory, that the Cold war was the only incentive of Russia, China and their third-world satellites to stay abreast of the West, scientifically and technologically.
The threat of conflict, created the necessity for an inegalitarian hierarchy.
Whether every child can read or has proper healthcare has little to do with a nation’s greatness.
But the post-Stalin and Mao regimes were forced to march in lock-step with the idealogy of Western liberalism.
No child left behind for the sake of appearances.
Nobody wants to walk one mile in the dictator’s shoes, but nevertheless,
it’s impossible to judge Mao, because Chiang would not have done things much differently, were he not a U.S. proxy.
Idi Amin, the African Hitler was under the gun from the beginning, and his sloppy governance and general behavior was, like Hitler’s, a product of living in constant danger.
Compare his to more recent and unsuccessful careers of rightwing Generals like the late Savimbi and the soon to be-late Laurent Nkunda.
Africa’s birthrates flourished through genocide famine and socialistic deculturalization.
When liberals analysts speak of twin-virtues of of ‘literacy’ and ‘healthcare’ they must adopt an unprogressive viewpoint, because we’re dealing in purely quantitive terms with shifts and alterations rather a lineal history.
October 26, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Jewgar:
I was trying to talk about communism, not Jews. Why are you obsessed with Jews? Are you an anti-semite? Huh, HUH!?
Not all the NRO folks are neo-cons (I don’t even know if Jonah Goldberg would qualify), though they are generally fellow-travelers. The Weekly Standard is the most well-known neocon rag, so that’s more decisive evidence.
I agree that cheap labor interests are the main force behind immigration in the U.S (I don’t think that’s the case in Europe, which also has fewer Jews). Anti-immigration writers often overlook that angle because material interests are more boring than ideological struggles. The American Catholic Church tends to be rather autonomous and most American Catholics aren’t that enthusiastic about immigration.
B.B:
Thank you, I did not know that.
Savrola:
You just blew my mind, like, twice.
October 26, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Why are you obsessed with Jews? Are you an anti-semite? Huh, HUH!?
I can’t help it,man! There are some people who just can’t stop talking about us. Endlessly
Anti-immigration writers often overlook that angle because material interests are more boring than ideological struggles.
There is also the personal angle. Many of the restrictionists are paleoconservatives who blame the Jewish neocons for removing the paleocons from their positions of political power and cultural influence after Bush was sworn in on January 2001.
The American Catholic Church tends to be rather autonomous and most American Catholics aren’t that enthusiastic about immigration.
Neither do ordinary Jews care that much about what the AJC or ADL are doing. But try telling certain “Anonymous” internet posters that.
So, when are you going to hunt down more defenceless animals?
Personally, I think hunting is a bit pointless these days because the animals can’t shoot back. It would be more entertaining to hunt down other humans in nature reserves (and I can think of many humans who would deserve it too, unlike animals).
Unfortunately, hunting men for sport seems to be slightly illegal in this country. However, I’m sure there are places in Thailand where you can bribe officials to let you do that. And let you take a 14 year old boy back to your hotel for the night. If you are into that sort of thing…
:)
October 26, 2009 at 11:05 pm
> I agree that cheap labor interests are the main force behind immigration in the U.S
If not for the way the intellectual-ideological climate has been trending for decades, would those cheap labor interests even bother attempting this move? I think not. The question is the degree to which intellectuals drove that trend, or were instead more epiphenomenal to a trend caused primarily by vast wealth, and perhaps also female empowerment.
October 26, 2009 at 11:30 pm
Jewgar the Barbarian:
2001 is way too late. It really dates back to Reagan picking Bill Bennet over Mel Bradford. Funny enough, no Jews involved. If I had been around in the 70s/80s I likely would have been more sympathetic to many of the neocons than the paleocons (I think I mentioned before that some like Huntington & Nisbett endorsed by the latter today belonged to the former back then).
You make a good point about the distinction between the heads of such organizations and Joe Jew. Many liberal Jews upset about AIPAC make a similar point about attitudes regarding Israel/foreign policy.
Eric Johnson:
Hard to say. I acknowledged that immigration in Europe seems to have less to do with cheap labor (since so many of them aren’t working and come as “refugees”). Sailer often likes to point out “Operation Wetback” under Eisenhower. Rather than having to pass any law, he just replaced a bunch of border officials corrupted under the bracero program. Like the war on drugs, I think that supply and demand are just always going to win out. That’s why I want to channel immigration into a similar program so they are truly guests rather than “electing a new people”.
October 27, 2009 at 10:28 pm
2001 is way too late. It really dates back to Reagan picking Bill Bennet over Mel Bradford. Funny enough, no Jews involved.
See here.
“In 1980, Bradford was initially tapped by President-elect Ronald Reagan for chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The selection met with intense objections from neo-conservative figures, centering partly on Bradford’s criticisms of President Abraham Lincoln. They circulated quotes of Bradford calling Lincoln “a dangerous man,” and saying, “The image of Lincoln rose to be very dark” and “indeed almost sinister.” Another issue was Bradford’s support for the 1972 presidential campaign of George C. Wallace. The neoconservative choice, William Bennett was substituted for Bradford on November 13, 1981.
A letter supporting Bradford’s nomination, sent to President Reagan during the controversy, was signed by John East, Jesse Helms, John Tower, Strom Thurmond, Orrin Hatch, Jeremiah Denton, Dan Quayle and James McClure and eight other Republican senators. “Russell Kirk, Jeffrey Hart, Bill Buckley, Gerhart Niemeyer, M. Stanton Evans, Andrew Lytle, Harry Jaffa, and dozens of others” were also named as supporters. Irving Kristol, Michael Joyce and William Simon were among Bennett’s supporters.”
October 28, 2009 at 7:19 pm
I would have thought Jaffa would be on the other side.
Kristol was Jewish, Simon was a devout Catholic and member of the Knights of Malta. Wikipedia has no page on Joyce and a few seconds a googling was no help. So rather than “Jews”, we’ve just got “a Jew”.
October 27, 2009 at 7:30 am
Oh, those Jews… always up to no good.
Capitalism, and the forms of barter and informal trade which precede it, managed to implement itself. Yet no society has ever transitioned into communism in anything beyond name.
That fact should give honest advocates of communism pause – except, of course, that there’s no such beast. There are at most confused individuals who haven’t thought out the consequences.
October 27, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Drugs have infinite capital because of inelastic demand. We can impose costs on the trade, but there’s no alternative good to which customer demand can deflect. Broccoli corps just want to slip out of paying a market wage. Increase the cost of illegal labor and they will hire citizens. Unless they really think they can get around the costs you have imposed – and trying to get around costs usually imposes other costs – they have no reason to resist.
October 27, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Good point, melendwyr. The path of least resistance tends to be the way to go. I disagree about honest proponents of communism, one can easily be confused and honest at the same time.
Eric Johnson:
Nothing is infinite, and the demand for many “addictive” substances is in fact quite elastic. People are willing to go cold turkey, reduce consumption or switch to other substances if the price is right. I think the more likely substitute for the ag business is mechanization, as the old laboring class has either moved too far up for manual labor or become a non-working underclass. If guest-workers were truly guests we wouldn’t have to worry what to do with them or their children when mechanization eliminated their jobs.
October 27, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Well, if you can enforce guest work, you can enforce any other policy on aliens with comparable ease, since enforcing any such set-up requires the same information and pretty much the same actions. Certainly you may need to deport rather more people if there is no guest program.
Has a guest worker program ever worked out the way it sounds like it is supposed to? I wouldn’t know. I only the situation in Germany – many a Turkish gastarbeiter wound up lingering, and that program was what opened up the whole migration to Germany from the Mideast.
On drug demand elasticity, I concede. Still, users of lucrative drugs hide, and smugglers stay moving. Both probably have high time preference and might stop what they are doing for payments in social science experiments, yet be rather little fazed by legal threats. Employers can’t evade the law and aren’t as willing to, and do have mechanical and citizen-labor alternatives. Addicts, who I assume are the source of most cocaine money and certainly most heroin money, may not have great alternatives in real life. In fact, being paid X just to stay clean may be quite a bit preferable to them than alternatives they have in the real world. They sure do have high relapse rates, and their behavior is hard to change in the real word without creating perverse incentives – despite much effort by government.
October 28, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Well, if you can enforce guest work, you can enforce any other policy on aliens with comparable ease, since enforcing any such set-up requires the same information and pretty much the same actions.
No, a guest-worker program aligns incentives and goes less against the flow. It just occurred to me that John Nye’s book “War, Wine and Taxes” is a good example of this kind of effect. On paper, England had lower taxes than France. However, it had higher tax revenue. The reason is that it fostered an oligopoly of brewers which were granted freedom from competition in exchange for compliance with taxes, since tax violation was so rampant. We can set up a working relationship with companies providing laborers (there are already temp organizations for office workers) and hold them responsible when rules get broken (like not showing up when they’re supposed to go back home). Guest-workers would rather enter under their aegis than sneak through the desert with a coyote, at risk of being caught and hence afraid to return to their families only to have to make that trip again. As long as wages are low, employers will prefer to hire through these providers. With the flow of immigrants redirected through official channels, the unnofficial channels will be sparser and easier to handle by concentrating resources on them. I think we should build a fence first and attain some credibility on controlling the border.
Has a guest worker program ever worked out the way it sounds like it is supposed to?
Yes, the Gulf States run on that model. Lefties hate it, but it seems to work. I think Singapore also relies heavily on guest labor. The Phillipines rely heavily on sending guest-workers abroad, but I believe it’s pretty much all legally and they go home when they’re supposed to.
I only the situation in Germany – many a Turkish gastarbeiter wound up lingering, and that program was what opened up the whole migration to Germany from the Mideast.
My impression is that Germany has much less of an immigration problem than other big European countries. Their decision not to grant German citizenship so easily to Turks strikes me as correct.
Both probably have high time preference and might stop what they are doing for payments in social science experiments, yet be rather little fazed by legal threats
My conclusion that demand is elastic is based not on social science experiments but on the reaction of consumption to changes in prices. However, some of that may be due to addicts spending a rather large portion of their income on their drug of choice, with the result that price changes have a big effect on their available income. Enforcement is supposed to raise prices, and that is the metric by which it is often measured, but increases in enforcement rarely seem to have much of an effect on it.
In fact, being paid X just to stay clean may be quite a bit preferable to them than alternatives they have in the real world.
Near the end of this video Mark Kleiman responds to a probation officer’s question regarding the “carrot” (as opposed to “stick”) by noting that offering middle class addicts $5 out of the $500 fined them for every clean drug test has surprisingly strong results. For whatever odd behavioural reasons, rewards/punishments that are quite certain are a lot more effective than alternatives which are much more severe but less certain.
They sure do have high relapse rates
I don’t know how long many of these studies track behavior, but if you watch the Mark Kleiman video I linked you’ll find that we have some methods which are astonishingly effective and getting hardcore addicts off drugs. It has nothing to do with the “medical illness” model of addiction, just a tough approach that Mao understood when he cracked down on opiates. Since I don’t actually care what harm addicts do to themselves, I prefer just legalizing the stuff.
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