Posted on 01/11/2011 9:32:35 AM PST by XHogPilot
Raúl Castro is intent on building an efficient and productive socialism, capable of generating profits. That is why he has just laid off half a million unneeded wage earners.
The objective is to detach 25 percent of the labor force from the state within 18 months. That's 1.3 million workers who will be put on the street so they may be absorbed by the still-unborn private microentrepreneurial sector. Castro and his claque keep repeating that the revolution cannot feed an army of idle workers. Subsidies must be trimmed, social benefits must be reduced.
The general is very confused. He understands nothing. He is hampered by his lack of experience in the business world, worsened by half a century of his authoritarian rule of the army.
The search for efficiency and productivity are the means used by capitalist enterprises to compete in the market. They are not goals. Entrepreneurs do not save, invest and manufacture fine products for love of their fellow men but out of fear that other entrepreneurs will displace them from the market.
Without competition there is neither development nor progress. The agony of producing increasingly more and better, using the least possible amount of resources, a permanent norm of the rigorous capitalist economy, is the consequence of competition. Where it doesn't exist, where monopolies prevail, or where monopolies are subsidized by the government, private enterprises tend to be inefficient, become technologically backward, creak under the weight of bloated payrolls and raise the prices of their products to compensate for their ineptitude.
The aims of entrepreneurs are closely linked: to make money and gain social prestige. In general, the more money, the more prestige and vice versa. Some, the few, have a philanthropic instinct, but this solidarity-driven impulse does not make them better or worse creators of wealth, though it does make them more interesting and benevolent human beings.
The aims of communists are different. Their bureaucrats do not produce because they feel the urgency to make money and gain prestige that spurs the entrepreneurial individuals. The best of them (a few) do so to redeem humanity; the worst of them, because they want to gain power within the Communist Party. To that end, they build egalitarian societies based on the collective property of the means of production, where they suppress liberties and subject the whole of society to the torture of the ``dictatorship of the proletariat,'' administered by incompetent fanatics.
The ``legitimization'' of that atrocious model of organizing society is the fact that it guarantees everyone a symbolic wage and certain basic goods, scant and bad though they may be, because quality, comfort and progress are not part of the objective of collectivist states, as shown by the communist experience in Europe or China during Maoism. It's a miserable little life, without any hopes of improvement, but at least you don't have to ``earn it.'' It's imposed upon you.
After emphatically repeating, for the umpteenth time, that he is not renouncing socialism, Raúl Castro has nevertheless turned to the capitalist methods to produce goods and services, as if in Cuba there existed a market economy based on competition. This has led him to adopt the worst of both worlds: a socialism without social benefits or subsidies, added to a capitalism without competition, without freedom to produce, and without a market, watched closely by the political police because hoarding and inequalities will not be permitted.
That's like trying to cure cancer with cough syrup. This confusion between means and ends, between methods and the objectives of basically different systems will soon reveal its shortcomings.
That's what happened to Gorbachev in Russia in the late 1980s. He tried to adapt some capitalist norms to make Soviet socialism more efficient and within a few years discovered that the Marxist-Leninist monster cannot be reformed. That blunder, that absence of reason, that spawner of monsters has to be demolished. Kindly, with controlled blasting and without bloodshed -- but it must be demolished.
Raul Castro wants to realize Senator Ted Kennedy’s dream of “doing socialism right” as quoted in the congressional record.
Hey Raul, there already is such a system. We call it "Free Market Capitalism". Now report to your drooling brother to receive your execution date.
Only capitalism can keep socialists fed.
“. . the Marxist Leninist monster cannot be reformed . . “
Yes. It is built slowly and surely, line upon line, precept upon precept until it becomes as natural (almost) as breathing. - This is the Monster that Obama and the liberal/socialist Democrats wish to lay upon this country and the world (and have made a good start getting it done!). They see it not working and never having worked anywhere it’s been tried, but, of course, no one as SMART as them and their crowd have tried it yet. THEY are just the demigods to do it in their minds.
Raul is trying to adapt the Chinese model. China would have suffered the same fate as the Soviet Union, but they were willing to crush their opposition by any means necessary, as they did at Tienanmen Square. The Soviets tried during the coup attempt, but Yeltsin stopped them.
There is another difference. When Gorbachev tried to fix the Soviet economy, difficult as it proved, the world economy was in pretty good shape.
At the moment, the world economy is sick, and teetering on the brink. So Raul is going to find it hard to practice a Chinese system, based on exports, when nobody has the money to buy the stuff he might want to sell.
The basic flaw of communism: Karl Marx did not understand that if people can’t own things, they don’t work. When their natural right to own things is protected, they work very hard. In fact, they create the United States of America.
Except for that black stuff they will produce from drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. It will sell, top dollar too.
Except for that black stuff they will produce from drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. It will sell, top dollar too.
An even more basic flaw: Karl Marx did not understand that people are not animals. Animals don't care if they own the stuff they are producing; people do.
Communism is unnatural and anti-human. Raul is actually giving capitalism a back-handed compliment.
If Cuba would clean out the Castro's and Commies, they could turn that island nation into another Bahamas, etc.
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power"
--Benito Mussolini
Excellent post; it’s a keeper.
Castro used to be an antientrepreneurialist. Then he was a proantientrepreneurialist. Next he’ll b a proantiproentrepreneurialist.
Then he will be denounced by world renowned economist Sean Penn as being a revolutionary proantiproentrepreneurialist.
Yes, that is an even more basic point!
“Then he will be denounced by world renowned economist Sean Penn as being a revolutionary proantiproentrepreneurialist.
“
:-D
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