tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch) (07/26/85)
Distribution: In article <358@ll1.UUCP> jar@ll1.UUCP (Jim Rhodes) writes: >Democracy was created to give the Socialist and Communist groups >to blame for their problems and everyone else's. My impression was that some capitalists and most socialists and communists endorse "democracy" as an ideal. In the case of capitalists, "democracy", of course, should be modified by a set of individual rights and an almost-complete "hands-off" approach where private property is concerned (hence protection of the class which holds lots of private property, etc....). In the case of conventional Eastern European apparatchiks, "democracy" should be modified by a doctrine of the maintenance of a "dictatorship of the proletariat", which amounts to the protection of a different class. Part of the problem of Eastern Europe is that the question of whether individual rights should be added to the list of institutions moderating "democracy" is still a matter under debate. The socialists and communists I like (Roy Medvedev, to give one example) would add individual rights to this list. >Just think if the world was communist, everyone would be equal and >starving, except for the leaderships of those countries. I haven't >noticed any leadership of starving nations look like they are suffering >from malnutrition yet. Is this an argument that communist countries can't industrialize? Or that having a leadership (or any group) which is better fed than the poorest segments of a population contradicts communist ideals? Not so. Many communist countries have industrialized, and communist ideals do not force absolute equality on everyone. At least not today, after a communist historical experience of 65 years or so. Maybe cause and effect are getting confused here. Piotr Berman makes a good argument in a previous article that strong state governments are caused by great poverty and famine, because otherwise poor vs. rich battles would tear a country up. A corollary to this would be that weak state governments are only possible in less extreme, more affluent economies. Some people argue as if the contrary were true, that strong state governments necessarily cause great poverty and famine, and weak state governments bring about affluence. Aside from my own belief that this gives far too much credit to state governments for economic successes, credit they often don't deserve, there are many historical examples of countries which had strong state governments and got out of poverty (the USSR, for one), and also many historical examples of countries which had weak state governments and never got out of poverty (Ethiopia under Haile Selassie, for one). I usually think that libertarians are statists in a causal sense, because libertarians usually think that a particular state structure (private property contractarianism) would solve most economic and political problems. That's absurd. Societies and states are rarely that tightly connected. But correlation and cause-effect are not the same, confusion aside. Also, I wouldn't be a good leader if I were suffering from malnutrition. I doubt anyone else would be either. Tony Wuersch {amd,amdcad}!cae780!ubvax!tonyw