It is contrary to human nature. It will only work by force. That is what is wrong with it.
While this is what the murder weapon is commonly called outside USA, in this country we call it an ice axe.
It's a climber's tool, not a spike for chipping off chunks of ice.
FWIW
In both cases the "inability of the regime to obtain food" was the completely predictable and well understood result of government price controls.
Economics in socialism is simply giving control of everything to giant national bureacracies.
These bureacracies can never deliver because of ineffciency, bureaucratic ignorance,non-responsibility to consumers, and inevitably corruption.
Same delusion as in the last century or 19th cent. when it was thought it was possible to invent a perpetual-motion machine. Inventors did not calculate friction into the equation.
Bureacracies are self-imploding, and that’s really about all socialism is.
Mark
Too simplistic.
The real problem with Bolsevism is this:
Classical economics is not a “system” but an accurate description of how people interact on a daily basis. In other words, Classical Economics (capitalism, or supply side capitalism) is a description of how people make daily decisions on how much money or goods or services to give up to procure things or services or power which they perceive to have marginally more value than the money or goods in their hand. That is economics.
When you depart from this classical model you no longer have an economic system, but a political system. When you start to centrally plan the value producing activities and their distribution you have decreased the economy because economics is nothing more than people making decisions and trading values. In essence the less the masses have decisions in value and its production, THE LESS ECONOMY YOU HAVE.
The Soviet economy at its height during Brezhnev’s reign never produced anymore than 1/4 of the US living standard on a per capita basis. Miserable performance because it was a political system that had nothing to do with economics.
The librarian Karl Marx was a good politician and a really horrifyingly bad economist. He and his illiterate minions were responsible for the deaths of 140 million people in the 20th century and Socialism can be counted as the largest disaster to have happened in Mankind’s history.
I thought about the push for secession we saw after the election, many articles about it here on FR. The mostly agricultural midwest and the south going their way, let the northeast and left coast go theirs. "We'll have the food supply, we'll starve out the northeast and left coast" were typical comments we heard.
But the northeast and left coast are Marxists. They are not going to sit back and let the "peasant" lower classes of "flyover country" starve them out anymore than the Bolshevists did in the article. Marxists impose their will by force.
If secession were to work here, it would have to defeat the Marxists militarily. Which the "White army" in revolutionary Russia failed to do in their war against the "Reds." Military confrontation would be inevitable. If secession has any chance it will be by people who are willing to fight and die for their freedom...and to prevail in it. Most don't have the stomach for it.
One of the other aspects of Marxism that is only tangentially discussed it this:
The belief that any number of experts can control and direct an economy is a direct result of hubris, a belief that one group is so expert at what they do that they can make decisions that are always correct in directing an economy. Oddly enough there is no known example in world history which would support that view as national and regional economies are simply too complex to be managed by a few.
In the case of the Soviet Union, the political system was enforced by guns and blood and the result was that the economy never developed as it would have normally. It was reduced and the potential for growth was reduced by this hubris of the Apparatchiki, the elite who fancied themselves the experts (they weren’t).
As we adventure through the next four years keep this in mind:
It simply is not possible for a centralized government to direct an economy. They can make some activities less desirable by taxing them or regulating them out of existence but the market (the economy, the people) will eventually redirect efforts that they cannot foresee. As we saw in the Soviet Union in the nineties when the Soviet flag was taken down. That was a decision by the market that the cost of the political regime was too high for the goods and services and resulting lifestyles delivered.
The best path for us in the future is to elect leaders in all arms of government who will do as little as possible to bother people so that they the people will be free to create the economy that they wish. A light hand in government, a hand that rarely touches the decision making capacity of the people is economically the best.
Ah has spoken. Buffaloguy.
Whenever ever I hear a leftist described as bright, I wonder how someone supposedly bright could fall for something as obviously foolish as socialism.
bump for later
Next question?
The wanton slaughter of people comes to mind real quick.
Stopped reading right there. Good post up until then. Communism has not fallen, it's been disguised, and it is HERE.
FMCDH(BITS)
Sounds just like Bronco.
According to Marxist/Leninist theory, there are four phases to the revolution:
1. Revolution of the proletariat
2. The dictatorship of the proletariat
3. The withering away of the state
4. Ultimate freedom of the collective
Problem is: Phase 3 never seems to happen.
“Just What Was Fundamentally Wrong with Bolshevism?”
What is fundamentally wrong with lies, theft, terror, torture, enslavement or murder?
The problem with this article is it doesn’t consider the facts of the Soviet economic life other than pertaining to the Russian Civil War time. The USSR survived a bit more.
Very good article