• Tag Archives communism

  • The Soviet Union Began as a Democratic Experiment in Socialism

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    When Bernie Sanders made his debut on the national stage in 2016, most Americans had never heard of democratic socialism (the idea that the government controls the means of production but we all get to vote). But in the four years following his loss to Hilary Clinton, it’s become a major topic for American politics. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) party has seen an explosion in membership and openly socialist politicians like Bernie and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are occupying some of the highest positions in our government.

    The democratic socialism these politicians promote are radical ideas by traditional American standards, but they are far from new. They have been theories that were put into practice a century ago on the other side of the world in the now defunct Soviet Union.

    In Russian, Soviet means “council.” In theory this system was going to create a voice for every member of the proletariat (working class) to be heard and guide their destiny by voting for their own representatives from their local areas to make their voices and choices recognized by the larger government.

    Factories and small villages were their own soviet group at the lowest and most local level. They chose and voted for representatives to serve in the larger town soviet. The town soviet would elect representatives from their group to serve in the regional soviet which then elected members for the provincial soviet. From there, members would be elected to the Soviet of Constituent Republic, which was the soviet in charge of the specific member country within the Soviet Union. That group would then send representatives to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

    In the 1940s there was an estimated one million USSR citizens participating in the Soviet System. In theory, anyone could rise through the soviet system to one day be in the Supreme Soviet. On paper this was the ultimate system of representative government serving its citizens. The small local soviets would make a list of what they wanted from the larger government and that list would move up the food chain. And if the soviet didn’t think their representative was doing a good job, they had the power to recall him and send someone else.

    Soviets practically had complete autonomy over their jurisdictions, in theory. They could utilize any resources from the larger government to their own liking. They could also govern themselves at a local level. The only catch was that their choices could not conflict with the interests of the nation.

    While this system of government sounds very nice, the truth was that the Supreme Soviet would rarely meet and when they were not in session they abdicated their power to the Presidium of the Soviet Union. This body was like all three branches of the US government rolled into one. The Soviet Union was a state with only one legal political party, the Communists.

    At the head of the party from the early 1920s through the 1950s the top man in that party was Joseph Stalin (1878-1953). During his first years in the office, he consolidated his power, outmaneuvered rivals, and eventually became arguably the most repressive dictator of the 20th century. As head of the party, Stalin’s interests were the national interests. As such, anyone who went against him was, in a sense, going against the national interest—which meant they could expect to find themselves, and perhaps their families, tortured and shot.

    The enforcers of the national interest was the NKVD, better known as the secret police. These were spy plants in the society keeping an eye out for anyone who could be a remote threat to the will of the party’s leader. You know, like anyone with relatives living abroad or the ability to speak more than one language. And to keep everyone in line even further there were mandatory purges at all levels of government and society with quotas. Citizens were executed, punished, and exiled not because they committed crimes but instead because the upper leadership wanted 20,000 “anti-revolutionaries” punished in a random city and to please the national bosses the regional bosses would give them 25,000.

    Life under Stalin in the great Democratic Communist USSR was pure terror. When we look back on the 20th century we tend to think of Adolf Hitler as the most-evil man of his day. An estimated 14 million people were killed by his direct actions. Stalin has him beat with an estimated 20 million.

    If any members of the Democratic Socialists Party of America have read any of this article, then they’re most likely going to instantly dismiss it as a hit job on their cause. They’ll protest that communism is not the same as socialism. While that’s technically true, the differences between the two are not apples and oranges; they’re Cortland and Winesap apples.

    Socialism is when the community controls the means of production. Communism is when the community controls the means of production and consumption. But command control of production cannot co-exist with market control of consumption without the result being shortages. The inevitable result, as seen in many other countries where this system is tried, will be that “the community” will take control of consumption.

    And unfortunately, no one person or group is smart enough, wise enough, or capable to micromanage a society. Some theories sound great but when put into practice they get proven to be wrong. With so many historic examples documenting the failures of communism and socialism it’s baffling that so many people in America seem to want to give it a try.

    In our modern age of information it’s very easy for us—and very important—to examine the past mistakes of others so that we don’t repeat them.


    Daniel Kowalski

    Daniel Kowalski is an American businessman with interests in the USA and developing markets of Africa.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Why Socialism Often Leads to Tyranny

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that communism leads to tyranny. Mention the countries North Korea, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Mao Tse Tung’s China, East Germany, and Venezuela, and most people immediately think of an oppressed population with almost no economic opportunity and no political freedom. The words communist dictatorship roll off the tongue like the two words have gone together forever. In fact, in an extreme irony, communism, ostensibly the most egalitarian form of government, in two cases led to the least egalitarian form of government: royalty or the rule of one family over time. The Kim family in North Korea and the Castros in Cuba have been ruling their countries like the kings and queens of old for some time.

    Sometimes it is argued that the personalities involved lead to tyranny, not communism or socialism. Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Fidel Castro, Erich Honecker, and Pol Pot are all bad people, but the personalities at the top matter little. Once a communist form of government is established, tyranny is the only result, regardless of which government official Game of Thrones’d their way to the top. Let’s examine the causal links that make communism a living hell for the people who have to live with it.

    The good news is you are entitled to housing, education, health care, and food. But that doesn’t mean people no longer have to work. The Soviet Constitution of 1936-Article 12 stated that “Labor in USSR is a duty and honorable obligation of each able citizen according to the principle: ‘Those who don’t work—don’t eat.’”

    If you persisted in demanding your right not to work, you wound up in the gulag, so thank God you live in a free enterprise, democratic society.

    The real issue that needs to be addressed here is that a government that controls everything can quash dissent by changing the economic situation of anyone who is pointing out their defects or is involved with the opposition. In a communist society, all jobs, all levels of education, the national police, the medical system, the judicial system, the electoral system, the housing stock, the food distribution system, the military, the press, and all forms of transportation are controlled by the central government.

    Write an insightful article about how a local government official is making a huge mistake (if you can find a computer to write it on), and you may find your apartment changed to the worst one available in a city where you don’t want to live. You could be reassigned from the job you trained years to get. For those of you who think the government using the medical system to advance its own interests is the fevered paranoia of a deranged libertarian, I would remind you that the Hong Kong protestors have developed a separate medical network rather than use public hospitals.

    When most of us interface with the outside world, we expect the highest possible pay for the work we do, and when we buy things, we expect the highest quality at the lowest possible price. Economics adds up those personal tendencies over millions of people in large, complex societies and comes up with a few simple rules that describe economic behavior. Supply and demand, marginal revenue and marginal cost, the theory of money, and specialization and exchange are really just simple rules that take all people’s actions and abilities into account and arrive at a solution that balances the overall societal equation.

    Communists and socialists don’t like these simple economic rules and come up with their own, such as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (your needs are generally unlimited), which conflicts with human nature. When you implement policies that conflict with human nature, you have to use force to implement them.

    One example of arbitrary socialist economics is Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s drastic intervention in the electronics businesses of Venezuela in 2013. The government of Venezuela basically arrested the managers of one electronics store chain and forced the company to sell its products at lower prices. A few people got a cheap television on a one-time basis thanks to coercive government intervention, but you can bet that any ability to buy quality electronics at a good price in Venezuela is now gone.

    A more serious example of communist economics is the Soviet farm collectivization of the 1930s. All the private, family-owned farms of the Soviet Union were converted to large collectivized farms. Stalin privately admitted to Churchill that 10 million people died, either from starvation or resistance to the forced farm collectivization. With a communist dictatorship, when a leader goes off the rails, there are no moderating forces that bring compromise or allow negotiation for alternative paths to lead a society toward its goals.

    Every person who works in a communist society is paid by the government and knows they will be paid whether the organization they are working for provides goods or services to customers or not. This is very different than a society where most companies are private and employees know that if the company or the part of the company they work for doesn’t sell products that pay the companies expenses, they won’t be employed anymore. A communist society also has no private company competition to provide improved, cheaper, and higher quality goods and services.

    A communist society’s productivity is a mere fraction of the productivity of an economy based on capitalism and free enterprise. The work ethic deteriorated so severely in the Soviet Union that a saying began circulating among the workers: “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” For a society to operate at an economic level much lower than its potential for generations is a loss that can never be regained.

    One great defender of liberty in the United States that never gets much credit is your local police department. They enforce the laws we all care about—murder, assault, robbery—but they report no higher than the local mayor or county supervisor and are paid for by local taxes.

    Communist societies are very top-heavy. They all have national-level police departments with ominous-sounding names that enforce the one true ideology over the entire country. In many communist countries, these national-level police forces turn family members against each other by asking children to turn in their parents if they say or do something against the government. One phone call seals your fate if you are a dissenter or independent thinker who is questioning how the government is doing things.

    To think about this concretely, imagine some high-level government official in the United States said another political party needed to be eradicated by force and/or locked up in prison. They’d have to get the law passed and then get thousands of local police departments to enforce it—a daunting task. Decentralized power is a power that defends liberty.

    Socialism is communism-lite. They believe in nationalizing some industries and or important societal functions but not all. Socialists will usually nationalize utilities, transportation, and large industries that tend to have labor problems. Here, the personalities involved matter a lot. Socialist governments either respect the prior governmental rules of free elections, separation of powers, and individual choice, or they push for complete government control of everything by their political party and end up allowing no dissenting political parties or individuals.

    To understand whether socialism leads to communism, we will study two cases. The first case is Britain after WWII when socialist parties were elected to national political office. The second case is Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez was elected president in 1999 on a socialist platform.

    These post-war British socialists took it pretty seriously. They nationalized coal, electricity, steel, and the railways and set up the National Health Service to provide government-run health care. Farms and grocery stores were allowed to be private, and the British electoral system was left to allow free and fair elections. After a number of years, the British economy performed poorly under socialism, and the British people elected politicians who believed in free enterprise and turned things around. Socialism doesn’t always lead to communism, and Britain pulled back from the brink when they saw that the socialist promise led to everyone being worse off.

    In Venezuela, the democratically elected Chavistas pushed for governmental control and brought in Cuban intelligence agents to assist them in quashing dissent and controlling the population. Venezuela had a special problem in that the government tried to force businesses into selling goods and services at a loss, implemented draconian currency controls, and were then surprised when the businesses stopped operating. The result in Venezuela was that stores had no goods on their shelves, hospitals had no medicines or machines that worked, and ordinary people took to looking through trash for food. Various political maneuvers were implemented by the Chavistas, the legislature was restructured, the judiciary was stacked, and the electoral system was compromised.

    Now, any political avenue for changing the government in Venezuela is gone, and they have the very dictatorship that characterizes communist societies, along with a broken economy that works very poorly, even by communist standards. If you want to implement communism, you start up mass production of staples, implement rationing, and wink at the black markets that spring up. In Venezuela, the socialists pushed their way through to dictatorship and tyranny, and a complete economic breakdown was the result.

    As I’ve said before, a communist society controls almost every personal, educational, political, and economic aspect of society. When faced with a government that has all those levers of control, you can be the toughest, meanest, smartest person and have people who agree with you—and your chance of changing the people in charge of the government is very low.

    Once the communist party in any given country has command over almost every control point, they all seem to have enough competence to use that authority to stay in power. Someone joked to me once that communism is the Hotel California of political systems—once you are in it, you can never leave. I can think of very few cases where “the people” overthrew a communist government. When a communist government moves on to a more open, pluralistic society, it is almost always because the people at the top decide communism is a bad idea and it is time to move on.

    Gorbachev opened the door, and communism fell in the Soviet Union. When communism fell in the Soviet Union, the countries in Eastern Europe that had communism forced on them threw off that yoke. In China, the people at the top decided to allow some free enterprise and individual opportunity to spring up while not giving up political control.

    A healthy society proactively avoids concentrating all power and resources in one party or person. This is more than just having multiple political parties and elections. It is the deliberate structure of society so that layers of local government, private companies, private or local educational institutions, civic organizations, judicial and police systems, individuals with personal wealth, non-profits, and religious organizations act as a brake on any party or person that goes off the rails and attempts to implement a dictatorship over society as a whole. A healthy society has private businesses that have to serve customers to stay in business.

    In a healthy society, politicians are given power relating only to their function: legislating, performing legal judgments, or managing a very specific, well-defined part of the government. Checks and balances with other offices of government are implemented to further reduce the power of government officials. The next time you get angry at the person your fellow voters put into office, remember that limited government is the tool that makes it so that leader can do fewer things that affect your life.

    The siren song of socialism and communism is alluring. Perhaps it is human nature that we want to be taken care of in all circumstances and be assured that no other person has material circumstances much better than our own. But the record is crystal clear. Socialism and communism lead to underperforming economies, loss of individual opportunity for generations, equality implemented by everyone being poor except the party apparatchiks, lack of innovation and progress, and incredible political and religious oppression. The next time you vote, look past the siren song and vote for someone who understands where freedom and liberty really come from.


    Thomas Gordon

    Thomas Gordon is a Silicon Valley Software Engineer with extensive UCLA Economics training who has blogged on financial matters as The Market Flash on Seeking Alpha.  Twitter tag: @flash7gordon

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Why Cuba’s Infant Mortality Rate Is so Low

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Fidel Castro, the dictator who ruled Cuba with an iron fist for almost six decades, has been dead for more than three years now. Unfortunately, his regime didn’t die alongside him. The Caribbean’s largest island is still under the burdensome yoke of communism.

    Since Castro took over in 1959, Castroism has been characterized by the brutal repression of political and civil rights, as well as low economic growth. Real GDP growth averaged a meager one percent from 1959 to 2015.

    Despite the lack of freedom and the poor economic track record, Cuba is often praised for its social achievements in health care and education, some of which rival developed countries. A good example of this is the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), which is defined as the share of children dying before their first birthday. The graph below plots Cuba’s IMR against four developed countries:

    Surprisingly, Cuba’s IMR in 2017 was lower than that of both the U.S. and Canada: 4.1 deaths per 1,000 live births as opposed to 5.7 in the United States and 4.5 in Canada.

    This seems counterintuitive. How could a poor country like Cuba, whose income per capita is a fraction of those of developed countries, outperform two of the world’s wealthiest nations?

    There are a few possibilities, both of which involve health care spending. Are these stellar numbers the result of Cuba spending more than the U.S.?

    Not according to the data. As the following chart shows, Cuba’s health care spending per capita is substantially lower than that of the United States.

    But higher spending doesn’t ensure better results. According to the Bloomberg Health Care Index, which measures cost efficiency in health care, the U.S. spends four times as much as Singapore in per capita terms, yet life expectancy is four years higher in the Asian country. Therefore it could be that, despite spending less, Cuba achieves better results.

    Unfortunately, Cuba’s planned economy is far from what anyone would call efficient. This means that there has to be another explanation.

    In fact, Cuba’s impressive IMR has a simple explanation: data manipulation.

    In a 2015 paper, economist Roberto M. Gonzalez concluded that Cuba’s actual IMR is substantially higher than reported by authorities. In order to understand how Cuban authorities distort IMR data, we need to understand two concepts: early neonatal deaths and late fetal deaths.

    The former is defined as the number of children dying during the first week after birth, whereas the latter is calculated as the number of fetal deaths between the 22nd week of gestation and birth. As a result, early neonatal deaths are included in the IMR, but late fetal deaths are not.

    For the sample of countries analyzed by Gonzalez, the ratio of late fetal deaths to early neonatal deaths ranges between 1-to-1 and 3-to-1. However, this ratio is surprisingly high in Cuba: the number of late fetal deaths is six times as high as that of early neonatal deaths.

    This number suggests that many early neonatal deaths are systematically reported as late fetal deaths in order to artificially reduce the IMR. Gonzalez estimates that Cuba’s true IMR in 2004, the year analyzed in the paper, was between 7.45 and 11.46, substantially higher than the 5.8 reported by Cuban authorities, and far worse than the rates of developed countries.

    That Cuba’s dictatorship manipulates self-reported statistics shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, the Castros have been trying for years to prove that, despite the lack of freedom in their country, their regime has built a welfare state where high-quality public services are guaranteed for all citizens.

    Nothing could be further from the truth. The only achievement of the 1959 Revolution was to turn Cuba into a huge prison where misery and repression dominate the lives of millions of Cubans that haven’t had the opportunity to flee the country in search of a better life.

    Dictatorships have always resorted to data manipulation for political purposes. This isn’t new. What is really disturbing is that Western intellectuals continue to buy the propaganda of the oldest tyranny in the Americas.

    This article is republished from Intellectual Takeout.


    Luis Pablo de la Horra

    Luis Pablo De La Horra holds a Bachelor’s in English and a Master’s in Finance. He writes for FEE, the Institute of Economic Affairs and Speakfreely.today.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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