The Fragility of Statist Societies
Statism: (noun) 1. the principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political, and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty. [Random House]
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman isn’t alone in touting the alleged benefits of authoritarian regimes. A variety of progressives claim that utilitarian arguments show it’s practical to have the state control large swaths of citizens’ lives. Ethical arguments aside, that view is belied by a large body of evidence.
The recent Russian drought and fires required them to slash exports by 30 percent. China’s widely admired infrastructure push has produced widespread dislocations from floods and man-made landslides. Haiti’s earthquake that killed over 200,000 will have them reeling for years, even with billions in international aid.
The point here is not simply that natural disasters cause major damage. It’s that the recovery time and effort in statist societies is typically longer, more painful, and causes major unnecessary social disruptions.
When there’s little freedom or incentive for private individuals to profit from cleaning up a mess, it has to be organized and paid for by the state. But the state always has lots of other financial commitments and priorities, and few reserves. With so many hungering to get a sliver of the spoils and so many expansionist plans always on tap, statist regimes are perpetually short of resources.
By contrast, countries with a much larger ratio of private enterprise to government are better equipped to endure economic shocks without producing national crises.
Private insurance companies, by their nature, maintain large rainy day funds. Despite the severe drains caused by the after-effects of 9/11, Berkshire Hathaway continued to thrive. Many news reports from a few years ago showed that privately run Katrina disaster-relief programs around New Orleans hummed (slowed only by local bureaucracy) while state efforts lagged.
Economists Andreas Bergh and Magnus Henrekson have produced a study showing this:
In wealthy countries, where government size is measured as total taxes or total expenditure relative to gross domestic product (GDP), there is a negative correlation between government size and economic growth — where government size increases by 10 percentage points, annual growth rates decrease by 0.5 to 1 percent.
Beyond the material and economic effects of poor disaster relief, statist societies are more exposed to wide-scale social unrest — usually in the form of open violence.
The United States has been in existence for over 220 years in its present form. Much has changed, particularly in the past 40 years as progressive ideas accelerate the weakening of its foundation. Yet through earthquakes, floods, and wars, America remains. Large-scale riots, common in statist countries despite severe repression, are rare here. Nationwide disputes may be noisy in the U.S., but they’re typically settled peacefully. (Note how the exceptions occur when statists like the SEIU and G8 protestors are involved.)
During half that same period, Russia and China have had three wrenching shifts from monarchism to communism to the unstable mixed systems of today. Several South American countries have seen a new form of government every twenty years or so, most of them statist. Greece went from a colonial monarchy to a military junta to a welfare state to a basket case. All these events carried with them widespread violence.
Left/liberals’ idea: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc. jacked it up, but WE can make statist solutions work THIS time because WE know better!
I disagree. Today’s statists/leftists do NOT argue that they now know how to do Marxism correctly so that the mass slaughter of political opponents doesn’t need to happen. In fact, the ones I’ve argued with resolutely REFUSE to criticize Marx and even most of his followers. (The exception is Trotskyites who will loudly revile Stalin because he is well known to have ordered the death of Trotsky.) Somehow, Marx and the earlier generations of Marxist leaders are sacrosanct to today’s Marxists and they simply will not criticize them.
The really hardcore Marxists simply deny the mass murders perpetrated by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. The (slightly saner) “moderate” Marxists acknowledge that there were mass murders but assure you that they won’t do the same thing when or if they get into power. But if you defy them to say what they would do differently in any detail, they just shut up and leave the conversation. I strongly believe that they have nothing like an “improved” or “more humane” Marxism: if they did, I’m sure they’d be willing to give you details. If they had the power to control the state, they would simply try the exact same murderous ideas that they tried every other time – with the exact same bloody consequences.
Yes.
Of the several dozen examples in the last 100 years, the outcomes are all consistent….deadly consistent. So why would anybody think that next time will be any different?
Of course, it’s possible to argue that European Socialism / Marxism has been more benevolent, and perhaps it has. But don’t count the lives shortened unnecesarilly by enforced statist health care if you want a rosy answer. And since the European experiment is still fairly new, it will be interesting to see the fate of those countries as they precipitously descend into economic and demographic ruin. Perhaps the Commissars behind the curtain will allow changes in their systems, thereby insuring their own expulsion from their sinecures. Or perhaps they will choose to enact a wee bit more Central Planning which will keep themselves in the Politburo for a few more years.
Anybody want to place a bet?
The description of symptoms is correct, however the cause is not explained;
The American Government is no longer able decide its own fate regarding the economy. It is made for Americans by European Central banks, using the Federal Reserve as its proxy.
Social programs are required because the Economy is purposely hollowed out. Why is it people could work at gas station and afford a House 50 years ago, and today it takes 2 professional incomes..?
Because the dollar has collapsed due to incompetent Federal decisions the last 50 years. It will continue getting worse until there is complete collapse, or the voter drops partisan politics and removes incumbents.
Vote in fiscally conservative and constitutionally minded individuals.
The greed of corporate plutocrats who insist on enriching themselves at the expense of workers is the reason it takes two professional-level incomes to afford a home in today’s world. Greedy billionaires take so much for themselves there is nothing left for anybody else.
As for social programs, there are no social programs in America worthy of the name. They are mere window dressing set up by the plutocrats to divert attention from their own greed while ordinary people starve. A compassionate society would seize the wealth of the billionaires and establish rights to food, housing, health care and jobs for all.
Rubbish, it is not greedy billionaires taking all the wealth. That is a popular myth. If you were to confiscate all the wealth of worlds top thousand richest men you would not even put a decent dent in the US National debt.
What you would achieve is world-wide recession as the successful and productive companies of these rich people will collapse and send millions of people unemployed. Along with it it would send the mum and pop shareholders down the drain as well.
Thinking that billionaires hog all the wealth is the naive thinking of a 6 year old child.
You do not have, nor should you have, a right to food housing, a job, etc…. You have to EARN it!
You exposed your true leanings. You want to seize the assets. You want to STEAL! You are just a lowly thief! You have the heart of a thief.
After you have done so, and the money is all spent, where will you get the next bunch of money to continue to pay for your “rights”, fool?
Socialism is the ridiculous notion that all property belongs to the State. It is a complete absence of property rights. Our Founders put property rights into the Bill of Rights, as a necessary component of freedom. Socialism and our Constitution are completely antithetical to one another.
Have you ever noticed that the Socialists never offer Constitutional Amendments? They KNOW Americans would reject their tripe, so they always try to get around the bulwark of the Constitution. Like the sneak-thieves they are.
Also, the violence in statist societies is invariably perpetrated by the rulers against either foreign “enemies” or, more often, their own people.
One of the more often overlooked principles of government is Chalker’s Axiom, first codified by SF writer Jack Lawrence Chalker. It states that “Political power is meaningless to its possessor unless it can be used against someone the possessor dislikes, and at the victim’s expense”. For the most part, in statist societies “someone the (leaders) don’t like” is defined as “everybody in the society other than the leaders”.
“Social reformer” types who establish statist regimes’ are generally adrenalin junkies by nature. They live for the thrill of imposing their will on others, in so doing confirming in their own minds their own innate superiority. Once the thrill of conquest is gone, however, it becomes more and more difficult to get the same “rush” from the day-to-day, boring business of actually running things. There is little excitement in budgeting for road repairs or sewage treatment, after all.
Furthermore, such people are inherently paranoid. If you have seized power, to force your will upon those you define as less “enlightened” than yourself, you live in perpetual fear that somebody else is going to do to you what you did to your predecessors to seize power to begin with.
The combination makes the rulers simultaneously bored and restless, with an unhealthy dose of free-floating anxiety. The state was well defined by the Sixties song, “Kicks”;
You know that kicks just keep gettin’ harder to find
And all your kicks ain’t bringin’ you peace of mind
Lastly, it is the nature of those who define themselves as an “enlightened elite’” to blame everyone else but themselves when Things Go Wrong. Since they consider themselves perfect, they are also ipso facto incapable of error. Therefore, if something doesn’t work, it must be somebody else’s fault. And being who they are, they tend to consider that any shortfall on the part of others can only be a deliberate effort to thwart their Utopian plans. Meaning, Somebody Out There Is Not Worshiping Them As They Deserve.
Add it all together, and you have the recipe’ for every massacre ever perpetrated by a government against its own people. As Argentine strongman Leopoldo Galtieri said re his junta’s campaign of “disappearing” opponents;
“First we will kill those who oppose us. Then we will kill those who do support us. Then we will kill the timid. And then all the rest.”
Which to the unbiased ear sounds rather like a “futzie” from the old Judge Dredd comic promising to establish world peace by seizing power, freeing all the Umpty Candies, and then killing everybody. Fortunately for the people of Argentina, the junta then decided to divert the populace’s attention from their brutality (and the country’s tanking economy) by seizing the Falklands and declaring war on Great Britain. In doing so, they found out the hard way that a Pekingese never tangles with a bulldog.
(Of course, the present regime’ in Argentina is making a lot of the same mistakes, only based on leftist doctrine this time. Proving that stupidity is not the exclusive property of any one part of the political spectrum.)
You can look back through history and it always ends the same. Robespierre’ and Marat turned the French Revolution into a bloodbath of the French people, on the grounds that anyone who disagreed with them was an enemy of France. Mexico has had a succession of rulers (Diaz’, Huerta, etc.) with the same mindset. Communism was and is replete with examples, ranging from the brutal (Stalin, Ceausescu) to the unstable (Beria, Mao) to the plain crazy (Trotsky, Guevara’, and the Castro brothers). And let’s not even talk about such hellholes as Iran, Zimbabwe, Uganda under Idi Amin, etc.
Godwin’s Law prevents me from citing the worst example of all. But the same mindset can be found throughout the Islamic world today. (Including the parts owning, or about to acquire, nuclear weapons.)
When people with an absolutist mentality achieve political power, sooner or later they turn their polity into an abattoir’. As much as anything else, just because they can.
Which brings us back to science fiction, specifically Sheckley’s Law, named for SF satirist Robert Sheckley, who was nevertheless deadly serious when he wrote it;
“An absolute state is one in which, if the authorities make a mistake, they apologize, but if you make a mistake, the authorities kill you.”
For this reason, anyone who dreams of running an “absolute state” should not even be allowed to run a hot-dog stand. They might just try to poison their competitors. Or their customers.
clear ether
eon
Drat. The Galtieri quote should be “those who do NOT support us.”
cheers
eon
A thoughtful and positive article. Thank you.
I am reading Taubman’s biography of Khrushchev. Last night I got to the part were Stalin is fed-up with the peasant farmers and begins collectivizing the land. This leads directly to 8-10 million dying in a famine.
All I could think about is the van Jones clips on Glenn Beck. van Jones would rail that we had the wrong agricultural system. Can you imagine handing over our farm economy to a statist like van Jones and the hell that would put us in.
Then I think oh my god we just did that with health care.
“Despite what progressives preach, individual freedom is always the quickest path to domestic stability.”
Only amongst a religious and moral populace. ( see Adams )
When captains of industry resort to piracy, having bought off the political and judicial class, individualism devolves to sociopathic behavior.
“When there’s little freedom or incentive for private individuals to profit from cleaning up a mess, it has to be organized and paid for by the state. ”
It is surely correct to note that the French revolution turned into a bloodbath, but there is also plenty of evidence to uphold the opinion that France was in no way ready to govern itself along the orderly democratic lines of the nascent U.S. polity across the Atlantic. And it is a fact that the womb for the worst excesses in France was the popular element (in Madison’s sense—the common people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder), the sansculottes. As Rousseau had observed, democracy is not the fruit of all climates and places.
So the quote above from Perren’s article, cuts 2 ways. There are plenty of instances in which lack of private profit means that important works will not be undertaken (and I don’t mean only national defense). And the only way in which a capitalist democracy functions well is if there is a state strong enough to put bounds to markets and enforce the rules. Our enthusiasm for freedom should not cause us to forget that, even if it is “the ultimate social goal,” it takes a lot of effort to make sure that liberty is not license.
Your use of the term democracy with respect to what France may or may not been ready for and it’s comparison to the American experiment across the pond is fallacious at best. We didn’t and don’t have a democracy in the United States, we have a representative republic, which, for better or worse, is designed to protect all of us from the tyranny of, well, the rest of us.
What we are discussing here is really conflict between tribe and nation state. The US was designed to establish fifty tribes composed of smaller unit tribes, all working in voluntary cooperation. Nation states form, grow power, and maintain power by the forceful subjugation of tribal peoples. The tribal instinct is based on blood lines and personality, and is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Nation states are not. Therefore there has been a long history of control and rebellion. Since control and rebellion do not create wealth, where this happens people suffer. Also tribes can last for centuries,but nation states invariable decline because the web of influences that give them power degrade as people forget why they must act together. Tribes can be extremely resistant to nation states. For example the Commanche held back the whites for a century until they lost to attrition. Afghanistan is tribal and they have fought the two great superpowers to a standstill over the last thirty years.
But take heart. Nation States are inherently fragile. Just turn off our power grid for a few months and watch us become tribal. Nation states by their own nature cannot last.
Freedom! Perhaps one of you citizen-patriots could recall any given Obama and his administration’s speeches about freedom?
What right-wingers call “freedom” is merely license for the greedy billionaires to run roughshod over the poor and weak. The only reason there is any response to natural disaters at all is becuase they effect the property values of the aforementioned billionaires. When they don’t, people are left to suffer and die without any succor at all. Even if it was not politically expedient for the Bush regime to kill Blacks, the victims of Hurricane Katrina were left for dead because they were deemed worthless by the corporate plutocrats.
You sir, are a dangerous idiot!
I have no link to any billionaires in any way that would cause me to behave in the way you describe yet I donate money to the less fortunate, including those who suffered at the hands of mother nature during hurricane Katrina, as did literally millions of Americans, almost all of whom have no direct link to billionaires.
Are you really so jealous of anothers success that you think it smart to formulate policy on said jelousy?
How Obama Spent (Some) of His Summer Vacation
“V-A-See-A-T-I-O-N, we’re on vacation, we’re gonna have a ball!” (Connie Francis)
It may be antiquated and not “with it” today but a popular back-to-school, first week assignment to get kids back to the grind used to be to have them write about how they spent their summer vacations. Most kids could write at least something on that easy topic.
If little Barry Obama were heading back to classes following summer vacation 2010, he would have a lot to write about. If he included where and how he spent this year’s vacations, to date, he could almost literally write volumes.
Compliments of IOwntheWorld.com, we present this pictorial insight into how our commander-in-chief, our president, our leader and chief bottle-washer, who had vowed, “I will not rest until everyone has a job, a good wage, and benefits,” has been spending his last vacation during this, America’s “recovery summer.”
Suffice to say, Obama, now being termed President Clark Griswold in a few quarters, has never, ever rested on his laurels nor on his vacations. Maybe he simply forgot that pledge to the American people and forgot those many millions of Americans still without a job, still without a good wage, and still without benefits.
Then, however, it would seem he has a surprisingly bad memory for such a smart dude since he’s forgotten any number of pledges and promises.
The pictures depict the president and First Lady thoroughly enjoying some ice cream during their vacation up there in the playground of the very rich and very famous, Martha’s Vineyard, where, for some very bizarre reason, GWB tee shirts were outselling BHO tee shirts. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1868)
“Nationwide uncertainty and social unrest are the inevitable response”
Yes, but this Tea Party unrest is a completely different type of social unrest to that arising in statist societies.
Otherwise, an excellent article.
Statist societies always get fragility with the passage of time. They can suppress internal decent but become ever more venerable to external forces. The Incas and the Aztecs did not fall to a few hundred men because the technology was Superior but because they had been in place for hundreds of years.
“Political protests have shown similar trends recently in America. While the charges of racism and violence are unsupportable, progressive commentators are onto something when they note the increased temperature at tea party rallies around the country.”
Seriously, WTF does this mean?
Responses to disasters, man made or natural, tend to be slow. Not because someone wants them to go slow. And on the subject of New Orleans & Bush, can you imagine the minority employees of FEMA or DHS getting together w/ Bush & agreeing to ‘stick it” to their fellow minorities in New Orleans? How pathetic was that assertion??!! Blacks were mostly affected because that city had a majority black population. No matter what was done, blacks would be negatively disproportionately affected in common numbers alone!
Over the past few years I have noticed many decry the poor or slow responses to disasters. The media always seem to assert political advantage or racism or a multitude of other causes as the reason. Media especially push any reason that is gory or that disparages those whom they politically oppose.
Folks… the slow response always happen. That government(s) is involved will always slow things down considerably. Many felt we stalled our responses to Katrina. It was racism. It was that despicable conservative, Bush.
What bunk. Logic must sooner or later be realized. Common sense must be applied.
Think folks. Think. It took over six months for the Defense Department to gather together the military force that was needed to push Saddam out of Kuwait & force his Iraqi government to capitulate. Thousands of soldiers. hundreds of thousands of tons of equipment & supplies. Ships, airplanes, tanks, food, ammo, weapons, and, personnel.
The response to Katrina’s effects on New Orleans was pulled together much faster. Yet the effort matched the invasion of Kuwait! The tons of supplies & the numbers of personnel almost match.
If it took that long to pull that much together to invade Kuwait, why did anyone expect a faster response to Katrina in the middle of a hurricane with high winds, breeched levees, a twenty foot sea surge, and thousands of people who failed to heed warnings & evacuate desperately needed rescue from locations all over New Orleans.
The problem folks is far too many of us have come to expect almost instant gratification when we demand something. In truth, we simply cannot be gratified that quickly. Its not logical, reasonable, or possible.
Now… add to any of these situations a federal or statist bureaucracy. Every petty bureaucrat demands each need, each requisition, each request, be in triplicate. And it must be delivered on bended knee by any bureaucracy that bureaucrat hates within the system & especially if its a political opponent.
Personally, there are times I am surprised we got into New Orleans as soon as we did. The roads were gone. The bridges were gone. Winds grounded airplanes. There were only five helicopters & pilots capable or qualified to fly in such conditions. Communications were eradicate at best. Only TV news was able to maintain connections & they were busy bashing Bush & all things conservative! After all, the racist meme had to be delivered so at next election, those racist white conservative Republicans could be demonized out of all office. This required those media types to work extra hard on the hyperbole, exaggerations, & accusations. After all, that was what the extreme left paid for & they were demanding the media focus on that agenda & not on communicating for the sake of helping those drowning folks.
The point is, patience would go a long way. In addition, depending on government to save you, is a fool’s errand, in the extreme.