Real economics....not the bubble Marxists live in..

[FiveInch033]

Why Did New Deal Spending Fail to Lift the American Economy?​

The Great Depression of the 1930s was by far the greatest economic calamity in U.S. history. In 1931, the year before Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, unemployment in the United States had soared to an unprecedented 16.3 percent. In human terms that meant that over eight million Americans who wanted jobs could not find them. In 1939, after almost two full terms of Roosevelt and his New Deal, unemployment had not dropped, but had risen to 17.2 percent. Almost nine and one-half million Americans were unemployed.

On May 6, 1939, Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, confirmed the total failure of the New Deal to stop the Great Depression: “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . . I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . . And an enormous debt to boot!” (For more information, see “What Caused the Great Depression?“)

In FDR’s Folly, Jim Powell ably and clearly explains why New Deal spending failed to lift the American economy out of its morass. In a nutshell, Powell argues that the spending was doomed from the start to fail. Tax rates were hiked, which scooped capital out of investment and dumped it into dozens of hastily conceived government programs. Those programs quickly became politicized and produced unintended consequences, which plunged the American economy deeper into depression.

More specifically, Powell observes, the National Recovery Administration, which was Roosevelt’s centerpiece, fixed prices, stifled competition, and sometimes made American exports uncompetitive. Also, his banking reforms made many banks more vulnerable to failure by forbidding them to expand and diversify their portfolios. Social Security taxes and minimum-wage laws often triggered unemployment; in fact, they pushed many cash-strapped businesses into bankruptcy or near bankruptcy. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers not to produce, raised food prices and kicked thousands of tenant farmers off the land and into unemployment lines in the cities. In some of those cities, the unemployed received almost no federal aid, but in other cities — those with influential Democratic bosses — tax dollars flowed in like water.

Powell notes that the process of capturing tax dollars from some groups and doling them out to others quickly politicized federal aid. He quotes one analyst who discovered that “WPA employment reached peaks in the fall of election years. In states like Florida and Kentucky — where the New Deal’s big fight was in the primary elections — the rise of WPA employment was hurried along in order to synchronize with the primaries.” The Democratic Party’s ability to win elections became strongly connected with Roosevelt’s talent for turning on the spigot of federal dollars at the right time (before elections) and in the right places (key states and congressional districts).

Powell’s book is well researched and well organized. His chapter titles are a delight. He synthesizes a mass of secondary sources (and some primary sources) in making a strong and persuasive case that the New Deal was a failure and that the Roosevelt presidency, at least in its first two terms — was a disaster. Powell covers all the major New Deal programs; he draws on the research of historians both “liberal” and conservative; and he is nuanced — this is no hatchet job — in that he concedes that some of Roosevelt’s policies, such as tariff revision, were more economically sound than, say, his industrial and agricultural policies.

FDR’s Folly takes its place on the shelf alongside Gary Dean Best’s Pride, Prejudice, and Politics and his more recent Retreat from Liberalism as liberating revisionist works that challenge the long-standing adulation of Roosevelt given by almost all historians. In the most recent Schlesinger Presidential Poll (1997), the historians and “experts” chosen by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., collectively ranked Roosevelt as the greatest president in American history, even though every other American president had lower unemployment rates than Roosevelt did for his first eight years in the White House. As late as 1999, David Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize for a book (Freedom from Fear) that largely praised the New Deal as a legislative program and Roosevelt as its author.

With the dawning of the 21st century, we may be witnessing the final departure of Roosevelt’s loyal academic propagandists and those targeted recipients of his federal largess. In such a climate, Jim Powell has given us, with FDR’s Folly, a refreshing, must-read account of the New Deal.

 

[FiveInch033]

War on poverty work?

America’s first war on a concept was an even more spectacular failure than the others.​

It was the age when administrations had slogans: Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the New Deal, Harry S. Truman the Fair Deal, and John F. Kennedy the New Frontier. Lyndon B. Johnson, not to be outdone, proclaimed that his administration would create the Great Society. In pursuit of that, in his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, only six weeks after he had become president upon Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson proclaimed: “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.” It was one of the biggest mistakes any American president ever made, and its damaging effects are still with us today.

Johnson proposed a broad range of social programs to accomplish this, including youth employment legislation, food stamps, expanded minimum wage laws, health insurance for the elderly, and housing and urban renewal programs. Much of this ambitious program was enacted and implemented. Federal spending rose to levels that had not been seen since World War II, and continued to rise ever after. Many of Johnson’s programs, although the nation had gotten along without them from 1776 until the mid-1960s, became, in the framing of Democrat propagandists, sacred rights that could never and must never be questioned.

Despite its sacred status in leftist mythology, however, the War on Poverty was a catastrophic failure. It has been a gargantuan exercise in applying the wrong solution to problems and only making them worse rather than solving them, yet the Democratic Party to this day is full of leaders who refuse to admit that it has been a defeat and a disaster and keep pushing to repeat its mistakes on an even larger scale.

• Buy All-American!
• Bring health and vitality back to your body with these non-transdermal patches
• Get your Vitamin B17 & Get 10% Off With Promo Code TIM
• How To Protect Yourself From 5G, EMF & RF Radiation - Use promo code TIM to save $$$
• The Very Best All-American Made Supplements On The Market
• Grab This Bucket Of Heirloom Seeds & Save with Promo Code TIM
• Here’s A Way You Can Stockpile Food For The Future
• Stockpile Your Ammo & Save $15 On Your First Order
• Preparing Also Means Detoxifying – Here’s One Simple Way To Detoxify
• The Very Best Chlorine Dioxide
• All-American, US Prime, High Choice Grass-Fed Beef with NO mRNA, hormones or antibiotics... ever!

The War on Poverty has cost American taxpayers over $22 trillion since 1964, over three times the cost of all the actual wars that the U.S. has ever fought. All that has resulted from it, however, is urban blight, nagging minority unemployment, and above all, more poverty.

Poverty levels were falling sharply before Johnson declared war on poverty; in 1950, 32 percent of Americans were considered to be living below the poverty line. By 1965, when the War on Poverty was just getting started, the poverty level had been cut nearly in half and was down to 17 percent. But by 2014, after trillions had been spent in the War on Poverty, it was at 14 percent, nearly the same as it had been when the War on Poverty began.


The War on Poverty failed because it ignored a basic law of economics: if you pay for something, you’ll get more of it, not less. As the government expanded welfare programs that subsidized food, housing, and health care for the poor, it got more poor people, not fewer, as the Johnson administration had created an economic incentive to remain poor.

The Great Society ended segregation in the South and replaced it with nationwide programs that were even worse for the poor, as they took away incentives to work and created a permanent unemployed underclass in which an ever-larger group of people were essentially wards of the state.

That may have been the idea all along. The famously coarse Johnson is said to have boasted about the Civil Rights Act of 1964: “I’ll have those ni**ers voting Democratic for two hundred years.” Between that act and the War on Poverty, he certainly did create a bloc of black Americans who could be counted on to vote Democratic so as to keep the free benefits flowing. Whether or not those votes were in the best interests of those who cast them was highly debatable, but they did contribute mightily to the perpetuation and expansion of the welfare state.

Between the New Deal and the Great Society, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson changed the idea of all too many Americans regarding what government was supposed to do. The welfare state they created has accustomed many people to think that the federal government exists to solve their every problem, and that everything that goes wrong in their lives must be set right by federal authorities. After decades of this corrosive nonsense, much more is needed than just a massive rollback of wasteful, unnecessary and counterproductive welfare state programs, although that is indeed urgently needed. What is needed is a massive educational effort to reintroduce Americans to the reality of why they should want less government, not more. But whether the will to mount such an effort even exists in America today remains to be seen.

Article posted with permission from Robert Spencer

 

[FiveInch033]

It Would Result In Job Loss
Evidence of job losses have been found since the earliest imposition of the minimum wage
 The first 25-cent minimum wage in 1938 resulted in significant job losses.
 Minimum wage increases recently imposed in American Samoa resulted in economic effects so pronounced
that President Obama signed into law a bill postponing them.
 A 2006 review of more than 100 minimum wage studies by David Neumark and William Wascher found
that about two-thirds found negative employment effects.
 In 2010, Joseph Sabia and Richard Burkhauser estimated: “nearly 1.3 million jobs will be lost if the federal
minimum wage is increased to $9.50 per hour.”
It Would Hurt Low-Skilled Workers
Evidence shows minimum wage increases disproportionally hurt the people they’re supposed to help
 The 2006 Neumark and Wascher review found the literature “as largely solidifying the conventional view
that minimum wages reduce employment among low-skilled workers.”
 A 2012 analysis of the New York State minimum wage increase from $5.15 to $6.75 per hour found a “20.2
to 21.8 percent reduction in the employment of younger less-educated individuals.”
 A 2010 analysis by Michael J. Hicks found: “the latest round of minimum wage increases” account “for
roughly 550,000 fewer part-time jobs,” including “roughly 310,000 fewer teenagers working part-time.”
It Would Have Little Effect On Reducing Poverty
Evidence suggests that minimum wage increases don’t reduce poverty
 In the previous federal minimum wage increase from $5.15 to $7.25, only 15 percent of the workers who
were expected to gain from it lived in poor households, according to a 2012 review by Mark Wilson. If the
minimum were today raised to $9.50, only 11 percent of workers who would gain live in poor households.
 The 2012 Wilson review noted: “Since 1995, eight studies have examined the income and poverty effects of
minimum wage increases, and all but one have found that past minimum wage hikes had no effect on
poverty.”
 The 2012 Wilson review noted: “One recent academic study found that both state and federal minimum
wage increases between 2003 and 2007 had no effect on state poverty rates.”
It May Result In Higher Prices For Consumers
The costs of minimum wage increases must be paid by someone
 The 2012 Wilson review noted: A 2004 “review of more than 20 minimum wage studies looking at price
effects found that a 10 percent increase in the U.S. minimum wage raises food prices by up to 4 percent.”
 A 2007 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found that restaurant prices increase in response to
minimum wage increases.

 

[FiveInch033]

Socialism and communism lead to underperforming economies and the loss of individual opportunity for generations.
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.

A Government That Is Giving You Things Can Take Them Away​

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.’” A government that controls everything can quash dissent by changing the economic situation of anyone who is pointing out their defects.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.

​

 

[FiveInch033]

Socialism and Communism Are Bad Economics That Must be Implemented by Government Force​

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.
Stalin privately admitted that 10 million people died, either from starvation or resistance to the forced farm collectivization.
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.

Local versus National Police​

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.
Decentralized power is a power that defends liberty.
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 Can Lead to Communism​

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.
The British economy performed poorly under socialism, and the British people elected politicians who believed in free enterprise and turned things around.
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.

Most Politicians Will Use the Power at Their Disposal to Protect Their Interests​

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.
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.
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.

​

 

[FiveInch033]

What a Healthy Society Looks Like​

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.
The next time you vote, look past the siren song and vote for someone who understands where freedom and liberty really come from.
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.

 

[FiveInch033]

Reason for Biden Immigration policy???

Put simply, most of the faster-growing states are red, and most of the slower-growing states are blue, according to the Census Bureau’s estimated state-by-state population changes between July 1, 2022, and July 1, 2023.
Of the 10 states that experienced the fastest percentage growth in population from 2022 to 2023, the top five voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020: South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Idaho and North Carolina. Two others in the top 10 did so as well: Tennessee and Utah.
If those population-growth patterns continue for the rest of the decade, it could seriously imperil the Democrats’ long-term chances of winning the White House. Each state gets one electoral vote for each congressional district, plus two for its Senate seats. So electoral votes are linked to population, but not on a one-to-one basis.
Several analyses, including one by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, have projected what the electoral vote map would look like if the population-growth patterns seen in 2022-23 continue uninterrupted until the next round of reapportionment, following the 2030 Census.
For Democrats, the picture is grim.
Among red states, Texas would gain four electoral votes; Florida would gain three; Idaho, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah would gain one each.
Among blue states, California would lose four seats, New York would lose three, Illinois would lose two, and Minnesota, Oregon and Rhode Island would lose one seat each.

Among battleground states, Arizona and Georgia (both won by Joe Biden) and North Carolina (won by Donald Trump) would gain one seat each, while the Biden-backing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania would lose one seat each.
“Population shifts pose a serious potential risk to Democrats in presidential politics,” said Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz.
While states used to switch partisan allegiance with some regularity, those preferences have ossified in recent decades.
“Unfortunately for the Democrats, a lot has changed over the last half century,” said Christopher Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University. “Today the partisan outcome of almost every state is virtually assured before we even know the candidates.”
Particularly notable, and potentially problematic for Democrats, is the growing population in the South.
According to the Brennan Center’s analysis, the South “has emerged as this decade’s growth engine, adding almost 3.9 million people and accounting for nearly all U.S. population gains since 2020.” By themselves, Texas and Florida accounted for 70% of U.S. population growth during this period.
One way to gauge the political impact is to look at how Biden’s margin of victory in the electoral college in 2020 would shrink if these population shifts continue.
In the 2020 election, Biden won the electoral vote, 306-232. But already, the population changes in the 2020 Census, when applied to the states Biden won and lost in 2020, would have produced a narrower victory by three electoral votes, 303-235.
If the changes seen in 2022-23 continue until the next reapportionment in 2030, Biden’s victory would have been smaller still – only 291-247. That’s a 15-electoral-vote swing in the Republicans’ direction, just due to population shifts.
The ongoing population changes are “more negative than positive for Democrats,” said Rice University political scientist Mark P. Jones.

 

[FiveInch033]

Socialism and Famine​

By Benjamin Zycher

AEIdeas

February 26, 2016

FacebookTwitterLinkedIn
My colleague Mark Perry posted recently a great excerpt from Alan Charles Kors’ classic essay on the ghastly death toll caused by socialism, and the disgraceful willingness of so many “intellectuals” to avert their eyes from that tragic reality. I urge everyone to read Mark’s post; and let me add two observations.
First, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression should be required reading for every college student — and perhaps every high school student — everywhere. A rigorous and disturbing study of the number of deaths attributable to communist political systems around the world, most professors and teachers should read it as well.
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/RTRP8I2_northkorea-e1456436470660.jpg?x85095
North Koreans rehabilitate rice paddy fields May 8, 1999, aided by the UN World Food Programme, in a region hit by five years of famine. Reuters.
Second: Famine is a disproportionately prevalent outcome of socialist systems, as illustrated in the following table summarizing the thirty famines of the 20th century.
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/20th-century-famines.jpg?x85095
Sources: Zycher and Daley (1989); US Bureau of the Census; World Bank; populstat.info; Institute of Development Studies.
Famines are the tragic result of many conditions: wars; insurrections; natural disasters and droughts; deliberate denial of food to specific populations by governments or by opposition groups, and so forth. But it is striking that famines under socialist systems are represented so heavily among the worst of the 20th century in terms of excess mortality as a proportion of the total population: six of the worst ten, and seven of the first fifteen.
Apart from intentional famines directed at particular parts of the population — the Cambodian and Ukrainian famines are good examples — it is likely to be the case that famines less intentional are more likely under socialism, because of incentives inherent under that system. Socialist economies must collectivize agriculture because without a system of market prices and profits driving resource allocation and production decisions, urban areas would starve: They have no means of inducing food production for urban populations. But collectivization tends to dampen production incentives, and certainly private incentives to store food in advance of adverse conditions; accordingly, famines are more likely to result under socialism when droughts or other events interfering with food production emerge.
Anyone who believes that socialism, or policies subjecting ever-greater proportions of the economy to collective control, can yield salutary outcomes for the great mass of ordinary people should take a hard look at reality. In this context, past performance really is a guarantee of future results.

 

[FiveInch033]

https://www.prageru.com/video/who-is-karl-marx

 

[FiveInch033]

When Karl Marx died in March 1883, only about a dozen people attended his funeral at a cemetery in London, England, including family members. Yet, for more than a century after his death – and even until today – there have been few thinkers whose ideas have been as influential on various aspects of modern world history. Indeed, as some have said, no other faith or belief-system has had such a worldwide impact as Marxism, since the birth of Christianity and the rise of Islam.

Marx’s critique of capitalism and capitalist society has shaped much of the social thinking in Western countries that led to the welfare state and extensive government intervention into economic affairs. And it served as the ideological banner that inspired the socialist and communist revolutions of the twentieth century – beginning in Russia in 1917 and still retaining political power today in such countries as Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and China.

In the name of the Marxian vision of a “new society” and a “new man,” socialist and communist revolutions led to the mass murders, enslavement, torture, and starvation of tens of millions of people around the world. Historians have estimated that in the attempt to make that “new” and “better” socialist world, communist regimes have killed as many as, maybe, 200 million people in the twentieth century.

Marx’s Private Life​

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in the Rhineland town of Trier. His parents were Jewish, with a long line of respected rabbis on both sides of the family. But to follow a legal career in the Kingdom of Prussia at the time, Karl Marx’s father converted to Protestantism. Karl’s own religious training was limited; at an early age he rejected all belief in a Supreme Being.

After studying for a time in Bonn, he transferred to the University of Berlin to work on a doctoral degree in philosophy. But he was generally a lazy and good-for-nothing student. The money that his father sent to him for tuition at the University was spent on food and drink, with many of his nights spent at coffee houses and taverns getting drunk and arguing about Hegelian philosophy with other students. He finally acquired his doctoral degree by submitting his dissertation to the University of Jena in eastern Germany.

Marx’s only real jobs during his lifetime were as occasional reporters for or editors of newspapers and journals most of which usually closed in a short period of time, either because of small readership and limited financial support or political censorship by the governments under which he was living.

His political activities as a writer and activist resulted in his having to move several times, including to Paris and Brussels, finally ending up in London in 1849, where he lived for the rest of his life, with occasional trips back to the European continent.

Though Marx was “middle class” and even “Victorian” in many of his everyday cultural attitudes, this did not stop him from breaking his marriage vows and committing adultery. He had sex enough times with the family maid that she bore him an illegitimate son – and this under the same roof with his wife and his legitimate children (of which he had seven, with only three living to full adulthood).

But he would not allow his illegitimate child to visit their mother in his London house whenever he was at home, and the boy could only enter the house through the kitchen door in the back of the house. In addition, he had his friend, longtime financial benefactor, and intellectual collaborator, Fredrick Engels, claim parentage of the child so to avoid any social embarrassment falling upon himself due to his infidelity.

As historian Paul Johnson explained in his book, Intellectuals (1988):

In all his researches into the iniquities of British capitalism, he came across many instances of low-paid workers but he never succeeded in unearthing one who was paid literally no wages at all. Yet such a worker did exist, in his own household … This was Helen Demuth [the life-long family maid]. She got her keep but was paid nothing … She was a ferociously hard worker, not only cleaning and scrubbing, but managing the family budget … Marx never paid her a penny …
In 1849-50 … [Helen] became Marx’s mistress and conceived a child … Marx refused to acknowledge his responsibility, then or ever, and flatly denied the rumors that he was the father… [The son] was put out to be fostered by a working-class family called Lewis but allowed to visit the Marx household [to see his mother]. He was, however, forbidden to use the front door and obliged to see his mother only in the kitchen.
Marx was terrified that [the boy’s] paternity would be discovered and that this would do him fatal damage as a revolutionary leader and seer … [Marx] persuaded Engels to acknowledge [the boy] privately, as a cover story for family consumption. But Engels … was not willing to take the secret to the grave. Engels died, of cancer of the throat, on 5 August 1895; unable to speak but unwilling that Eleanor [one of Marx’s daughters] should continue to think her father unsullied, he wrote on a slate: ‘Freddy [the boy’s name] is Marx’s son …

Marx’s Mean and Mendacious Manner​

In temperament, Marx could be cruel and authoritarian. He treated people with whom he disagreed in a crude and mean way, often ridiculing them in public gatherings. Marx had no hesitation about being a hypocrite; when he wanted something from someone he would flatter them in letters or conversation, but then attack them in nasty language behind their backs to others. He often used racial slurs and insulting words to describe the mannerisms or appearance of his opponents in the socialist movement.

For instance, in an 1862 letter to Frederick Engels, Marx described leading nineteenth-century German socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, in the following way:

The Jewish Nigger Lassalle … fortunately departs at the end of this week … It is now absolutely clear to me that, as both the shape of his head and his hair texture shows – he descends from the Negros who joined Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the paternal side hybridized with a nigger). Now this combination of Germanness and Jewishness with a primarily Negro substance creates a strange product. The pushiness of the fellow is also nigger-like.

In Marx’s mind, the Jew in bourgeois society encapsulated the essence of everything he considered despicable in the capitalist system, and only with the end of the capitalist system would there be an end to most of those unattractive qualities. Here is Marx’s conception of the Jewish mind in nineteenth century Europe, from his essay “On the Jewish Question” (1844):

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his worldly god? Money! … Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may exist.
Money degrades all the gods of mankind and converts them into commodities … What is contained abstractly in the Jewish religion – contempt for theory, for art, for history, for man as an end in himself … The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Jewishness.

(Marx’s caricaturing description of the asserted “Jewish mindset” rings amazingly similar to those that were later written by the Nazi “race-scientists” of the 1930s, who also condemned Jews for the same self-interested pursuit of money and the resulting degenerative influence that they believed Jews had upon the German people.)

Marx was also what some might label as a plagiarist. From 1852 to 1862, Marx worked as a European correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. Marx found it too burdensome to grind out the expected two articles per week, for which he was relatively well paid. Instead, he spent his time participating in revolutionary intrigues and researching, reading, and writing for what became his famous work, Das Kapital.

During Marx’s decade of employment with the newspaper, Friedrich Engels wrote about one-third of his articles. Marx’s name still appeared on the by-lines.

 

[FiveInch033]

A Filthy Home and a Personality to Match​

Many found Marx’s personal appearance and manner off-putting or even revolting. In 1850, a spy for the Prussian police visited Marx’s home in London under the pretense of a German revolutionary. The report the spy wrote was shared with the British Ambassador in Berlin. The report said, in part:

[Marx] leads the existence of a Bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he is often drunk. Though he is frequently idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has much work to do.
He has no fixed time for going to sleep or waking up. He often stays up all night and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday, and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the whole world coming or going through [his room] …
There is not one clean and solid piece of furniture. Everything is broken, tattered and torn, with half an inch of dust over everything and the greatest disorder everywhere …
When you enter Marx’s room smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water … Everything is dirty and covered with dust, so that to sit down becomes a hazardous business. Here is a chair with three legs. On another chair the children are playing cooking. This chair happens to have four legs. This is the one that is offered to the visitor, but the children’s cooking has not been wiped away and if you sit down you risk a pair of trousers.

Another report on meeting Marx was given by Gustav Techow, a Prussian military officer who had joined the Berlin insurrectionists during the failed revolution of 1848. Techow had to escape to Switzerland after being sentenced and imprisoned for treason. The revolutionary group with whom Techow associated in Switzerland sent him to London and he spent time with Marx.

In a letter to his revolutionary associates, Techow described his impression of Marx, the man and his mind. The picture was of a power-lusting personality who had contempt for both friends and foes:

He gave me the impression of both outstanding intellectual superiority and a most impressive personality. If he had had as much heart as brain, as much love as hate, I would have gone through fire with him despite the fact that he not only did not hide his contempt for me, but as the end was quite explicit about it …
I regret, because of our cause, that this man does not have, together with his outstanding intelligence, a noble heart to place at our disposal. I am convinced that everything good in him has been devoured by the most dangerous personal ambitions. He laughs at the fools who repeat after him his proletarian catechism, just as he laughs at [other] communists … and also at the bourgeoisie …
Despite all of his assurances to the contrary, perhaps precisely because of them, I left with the impression that personal domination is the end-all of his every activity … And [Marx considers that] all of his old associates are, despite their considerable talents, well beneath and behind him and should they ever dare to forget that, he will put them back in their places with the impudence worth of a Napoleon.

Playbook for Revolution and Mass Murder​

Marx’s desire to destroy the institutions of society and his blood-thirst towards enemies in the coming communist revolution was captured in his plan of action, written with Engels, for the Central Committee of the Communist League in March 1850. It reads like the literal playbook for what Vladimir Lenin did in undertaking the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

He stated that the goal of the organization was “the overthrow of the privileged classes,” initially in cooperation with the petty and liberal “bourgeois” political parties. Marx warned that these democratic parties only want to establish a liberal agenda of reduced government spending, more secure private property rights and some welfare programs for the poor. Instead, Marx said,

Its our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world …
Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one.

In the process of overthrowing the liberal democratic order that assumes power following the end of the monarchical rulers, Marx said that the revolutionary proletariat needed to form armed “councils” outside of the democratic government’s authority and control. This is the very method Lenin insisted upon in Russia in the form of “Soviets” after the abdication of the Russian czar in March 1917 and in opposition to the newly established provisional democratic government that replaced the Russian monarchy.

Marx insisted that the feudal lands were not to be turned into peasant-owned private farms. No, instead, they were to be taken over by the state and transformed into collective farms upon which all among rural population will be made to live and work. And all industries had to be nationalized under an increasingly centralized and all-powerful proletarian government, to assure the end of capitalism and “bourgeois” democracy.

In addition, Marx said, the communist leaders must work to ensure that the immediate revolutionary excitement is not suddenly suppressed after the victory. On the contrary,

… it must be sustained as long as possible. Far from opposing the so-called excesses – instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated – the workers’ party must not only tolerate these actions but must even give them direction.

In other words, Marx was insisting upon fostering a frenzy of “vengeance against hated individuals” that clearly meant terror and mass murder. And this, too, was the signpost that Lenin followed in assuring the triumph of his revolution in Russia.

The Foundation for Real Tragedy​

How did Marx become an advocate of mass murder and dictatorship in place of liberal democracy and social peace? What intellectual influences worked on him that lead to his becoming the visionary advocate of what he came to call “scientific socialism” and the belief that the “laws of history” dictated the inevitable doom of capitalism and the inescapable triumph of communism?

And how did his conception of mankind’s destiny create the foundation for the human tragedy of “socialism-in-practice” in the twentieth century?

 

[FiveInch033]

To be “close-minded” is, according to the dictionary, to be “intolerant of the beliefs and opinions of others; stubbornly unreceptive to new ideas.” To be conservative and close-minded, according to popular portrayal, is a redundancy—a package deal that liberals can and do take for granted.

But University of Virginia Professor Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Righteous Mind doesn’t simply suggest that conservatives may not be as close-minded as they are portrayed. It proves that the opposite is the case, that conservatives understand their ideological opposite numbers far better than do liberals.

Haidt’s research asks individuals to answer questionnaires regarding their core moral beliefs—what sorts of values they consider sacred, which they would compromise on, and how much it would take to get them to make those compromises. By themselves, these exercises are interesting. (Try them online and see where you come out.)

Liberals don’t know what they don’t know; they don’t understand how limited their knowledge of conservative values is.

But Haidt’s research went one step further, asking self-indentified conservatives to answer those questionnaires as if they were liberals and for liberals to do the opposite. What Haidt found is that conservatives understand liberals’ moral values better than liberals understand where conservatives are coming from. Worse yet, liberals don’t know what they don’t know; they don’t understand how limited their knowledge of conservative values is. If anyone is close-minded here it’s not conservatives.

Haidt has a theory regarding why this is the case, based on the idea that conservatives speak a broader and more encompassing language of six moral values while liberals embrace three of the six in a narrow set of core values. I see nothing wrong with this explanation.

But let me present a complementary, more practical explanation: If you’re a conservative who lives in a major metropolitan area or who simply reads the New York Times, you get used to being outnumbered by liberals. Liberals, by contrast, get used to being surrounded by other liberals, both in person and in culture and the media. As a result, liberals speak their minds freely, often in ways that are harshly condemnatory of conservatives and their stands on issues. As a conservative, you can defend your values against friends and acquaintances who essentially just called you stupid and evil or you can keep quiet.

As a conservative, you can defend your values against friends and acquaintances who essentially just called you stupid and evil or you can keep quiet.

Most conservatives, most of the time, choose the latter. That is, they stay in the closet to avoid being accused of hating the poor, gays, or polar bears. As a result, liberals aren’t gaining any commensurate information. In fact, the silence of their conservative friends helps reinforce their views. Much of the time, liberals’ views of conservative positions and values are simply a caricature that bear little resemblance to what conservatives actually think and, more importantly, why they think it.

But during that time when conservatives’ mouths are shut, their ears are open. They’re listening and understanding what liberals think—and what liberals think of them. Conservatives understand their own world—whether it’s of religious organizations, talk radio, Fox News, or whatever—along with the New York Times, network news world of liberals.

That helps explain why a conservative’s reaction to a liberal critique often isn’t “you’re wrong.” It’s “you don’t even know what I’m trying to say.” Haidt’s research seems to show that this reaction is warranted.

Andrew G. Biggs is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

 

[FiveInch033]

Should Karl Marx Be Canceled?​

14

Pierre Lemieux​

There are good arguments to the effect that nobody should be “canceled”; but if somebody should, it would be Karl Marx. For all we know, he was a bigot and a racist who even used the N-word, something worse for the current dominant culture than what many did who were canceled or will soon be. One of economist Walter Williams’s columns was titled “The Ugly Racism of Karl Marx.”
The main economic argument against the cancel culture is that of John Stuart Mill in On Liberty: freedom of speech is necessary in the search for any sort of truth. Not only do mobs historically and literally lynch unpopular individuals, but the fear of the mob also reduces the incentives to look for the truth and turns many people into wimps. Anybody can make youth errors but they are easily forgivable when the author later changes his mind; he should certainly not be punished simply for having been wrong (assuming he did not physically lynch anybody).
It is true that free speech does not—or should not—allow one to shout what he wants in somebody else’s living room or on a platform that belongs to somebody else. But we can still forcefully argue that the owners of private “speakers’ corners” should not be intimidated by witch-hunting mobs, especially when these mobs, as they nearly always do, are asking for the support of the government’s armed agents. The universities where the woke-cancel culture thrives do not belong to the wokes. And certainly, the state should not subsidize activism and speech against free speech.
The economist’s individualist methodology as well as the individualist values it often nurtures lead to the belief that an individual is not to be judged by the group, racial or whatever, to which he “belongs.” In a New York Times article (“A Profession With an Egalitarian Core,” March 16, 2013), Tyler Cowen illustrated the economists’ individualist values:

In 1829, all 15 economists who held seats in the British Parliament voted to allow Roman Catholics as members. In 1858, the 13 economists in Parliament voted unanimously to extend full civil rights to Jews. (While both measures were approved, they were controversial among many non-economist members.) For many years leading up to the various abolitions of slavery, economists were generally critics of slavery and advocates of people’s natural equality.

Two economists, David Levy and Sandra Peart, explained that Thomas Carlyle, a 19th-century man of the right, called economics “the dismal science” because economists opposed slavery. Levy and Peart write:

Carlyle attacked [economist John Stuart] Mill … for supporting the emancipation of slaves. It was this fact—that economics assumed that people were basically all the same, and thus all entitled to liberty—that led Carlyle to label economics “the dismal science.”
Carlyle was not alone in denouncing economics for making its radical claims about the equality of all men. Others who joined him included Charles Dickens and John Ruskin.

Back to Marx, whose ideas led to the death of tens or hundreds of millions of individuals and to the impoverishment of even more. It is true that (contrary to what the typical woke seems to think) words do not kill; killers kill and rulers impoverish. Marx’s free speech was helpful in the pursuit of truth: without him, how would we know, except theoretically, where theories like his naturally lead?
So what did Marx wrote that should kick him out of the New York Times, Teen Vogue, and many places of high dominant culture? But before that, remember how, after a 45-year career at the New York Times, Donald McNeil was recently harassed into resigning for having said the N-word in a conversation about somebody else who had used the word, notwithstanding his apologies. (I can only hope that speaking about somebody who spoke about somebody who used the N-word won’t bring my own cancellation.) In a similar fashion, Alexi McCammond was fired from a new job at Teen Vogue: a decade ago, the young (black) woman had apparently penned racist and anti-homosexual tweets for which she grovelingly apologized before the large masses.
Marx did not live long enough to be devoured by his revolutionary comrades as often happens. The French Revolution and Stalins’s multiple “disappeared” comrades provided dramatic illustrations. Wokes are now banning their own comrades from the bien-pensant society.
So here is finally (thanks for your patience!) an excerpt of a letter Marx wrote to Friedrich Engels on July 30, 1862:

The Jewish nigger Lassalle who, I’m glad to say, is leaving at the end of this week, has happily lost another 5,000 talers in an ill-judged speculation. The chap would sooner throw money down the drain than lend it to a ‘friend,’ even though his interest and capital were guaranteed. … It is now quite plain to me—as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify—that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also niggerlike.

This letter, written in German, is translated and reproduced in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1985), pp. 388-391. It is important to note that Marx wrote the N-word in English as reproduced above; he occasionally wrote other foreign words in their original language (see the preface to the Collected Works, p. XXXVIII). The same translation appears on a Marxist website, the Marxists Internet Archive 0r MIA. The site owners explain:

The MIA aims to maintain an archive of any and all writings which are Marxist or relevant to the understanding of Marxism and can be lawfully published. In the past, some writers who have contributed to Marxism have expressed racist, sexist or other distasteful views. The MIA generally does not “filter out” such views … The MIA does not endorse any of the views expressed by any of the writers included here, which are provided solely for the information of the reader.

A few years before the complete Moscow edition, a different translation of selected letters, including that of July 30, 1862, was made available by an American publisher: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Selected Letters: The Personal Correspondence, 1844-1877 (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1981), pp. 81-82.
When he wrote the incriminating letter, Marx was angry with his democratic socialist “friend” Ferdinand Lassalle for refusing to lend him money. Lassalle was Jewish and, as far as we know, had no black ancestor. Marx apparently thought or wanted to think the contrary. We can bet that no such excuse would spare any victim of woke cancellation. Moreover and paradoxically, Marx himself was Jewish, but attacking one’s own group identity must be another mortal sin for the wokes.
A possible excuse for Marx would be that he was a man of his time and that historical circumstances must be taken into account. Indeed, suppressing history prevents us from learning its lessons. But the cancel culture never accepts this excuse.

 

[FiveInch033]

ocialists are fond of saying that socialism has never failed because it has never been tried. But in truth, socialism has failed in every country in which it has been tried, from the Soviet Union beginning a century ago to three modern countries that tried but ultimately rejected socialism—Israel, India, and the United Kingdom.

While there were major political differences between the totalitarian rule of the Soviets and the democratic politics of Israel, India, and the U.K., all three of the latter countries adhered to socialist principles, nationalizing their major industries and placing economic decision-making in the hands of the government.

>>> What Americans Must Know About Socialism

The Soviet failure has been well documented by historians. In 1985, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev took command of a bankrupt disintegrating empire. After 70 years of Marxism, Soviet farms were unable to feed the people, factories failed to meet their quotas, people lined up for blocks in Moscow and other cities to buy bread and other necessities, and a war in Afghanistan dragged on with no end in sight of the body bags of young Soviet soldiers.

The economies of the Communist nations behind the Iron Curtain were similarly enfeebled because they functioned in large measure as colonies of the Soviet Union. With no incentives to compete or modernize, the industrial sector of Eastern and Central Europe became a monument to bureaucratic inefficiency and waste, a “museum of the early industrial age.” As the New York Times pointed out at the time, Singapore, an Asian city-state of only 2 million people, exported 20 percent more machinery to the West in 1987 than all of Eastern Europe.

And yet, socialism still beguiled leading intellectuals and politicians of the West. They could not resist its siren song, of a world without strife because it was a world without private property. They were convinced that a bureaucracy could make more-informed decisions about the welfare of a people than the people themselves could. They believed, with John Maynard Keynes, that “the state is wise and the market is stupid.”

Israel, India, and the United Kingdom all adopted socialism as an economic model following World War II. The preamble to India’s constitution, for example, begins, “We, the People of India, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic . . .” The original settlers of Israel were East European Jews of the Left who sought and built a socialist society. As soon as the guns of World War II fell silent, Britain’s Labour Party nationalized every major industry and acceded to every socialist demand of the unions.

At first, socialism seemed to work in these vastly dissimilar countries. For the first two decades of its existence, Israel’s economy grew at an annual rate of more than 10 percent, leading many to term Israel an “economic miracle.” The average GDP growth rate of India from its founding in 1947 into the 1970s was 3.5 percent, placing India among the more prosperous developing nations. GDP growth in Great Britain averaged 3 percent from 1950 to 1965, along with a 40 percent rise in average real wages, enabling Britain to become one of the world’s more affluent countries.

But the government planners were unable to keep pace with increasing population and overseas competition. After decades of ever declining economic growth and ever rising unemployment, all three countries abandoned socialism and turned toward capitalism and the free market. The resulting prosperity in Israel, India, and the U.K. vindicated free-marketers who had predicted that socialism would inevitably fail to deliver the goods. As British prime minister Margaret Thatcher observed, “the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

 

[FiveInch033]

srael
Israel is unique, the only nation where socialism was successful—for a while. The original settlers, according to Israeli professor Avi Kay, “sought to create an economy in which market forces were controlled for the benefit of the whole society.” Driven by a desire to leave behind their history as victims of penury and prejudice, they sought an egalitarian, labor-oriented socialist society. The initial, homogeneous population of less than 1 million drew up centralized plans to convert the desert into green pastures and build efficient state-run companies.

Most early settlers, American Enterprise Institute scholar Joseph Light pointed out, worked either on collective farms called kibbutzim or in state-guaranteed jobs. The kibbutzim were small farming communities in which people did chores in exchange for food and money to live on and pay their bills. There was no private property, people ate in common, and children under 18 lived together and not with their parents. Any money earned on the outside was given to the kibbutz.

A key player in the socialization of Israel was the Histadrut, the General Federation of Labor, subscribers to the socialist dogma that capital exploits labor and that the only way to prevent such “robbery” is to grant control of the means of production to the state. As it proceeded to unionize almost all workers, the Histadrut gained control of nearly every economic and social sector, including the kibbutzim, housing, transportation, banks, social welfare, health care, and education. The federation’s political instrument was the Labor party, which effectively ruled Israel from the founding of Israel in 1948 until 1973 and the Yom Kippur War. In the early years, few asked whether any limits should be placed on the role of government.

Israel’s economic performance seemed to confirm Keynes’s judgment. Real GDP growth from 1955 to 1975 was an astounding 12.6 percent, putting Israel among the fastest-growing economies in the world, with one of the lowest income differentials. However, this rapid growth was accompanied by rising levels of private consumption and, over time, increasing income inequality. There was an increasing demand for economic reform to free the economy from the government’s centralized decision-making. In 1961, supporters of economic liberalization formed the Liberal party—the first political movement committed to a market economy.

The Israeli “economic miracle” evaporated in 1965 when the country suffered its first major recession. Economic growth halted and unemployment rose threefold from 1965 to 1967. Before the government could attempt corrective action, the Six-Day War erupted, altering Israel’s economic and political map. Paradoxically, the war brought short-lived prosperity to Israel, owing to increased military spending and a major influx of workers from new territories. But government-led economic growth was accompanied by accelerating inflation, reaching an annual rate of 17 percent from 1971 to 1973.

For the first time, there was a public debate between supporters of free-enterprise economics and supporters of traditional socialist arrangements. Leading the way for the free market was the future Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, who urged Israeli policymakers to “set your people free” and liberalize the economy. The 1973 war and its economic impacts reinforced the feelings of many Israelis that the Labor party’s socialist model could not handle the country’s growing economic challenges. The 1977 elections resulted in the victory of the Likud party, with its staunch pro-free-market philosophy. The Likud took as one of its coalition partners the Liberal party.

Because socialism’s roots in Israel were so deep, real reform proceeded slowly. Friedman was asked to draw up a program that would move Israel from socialism toward a free-market economy. His major reforms included fewer government programs and reduced government spending; less government intervention in fiscal, trade, and labor policies; income-tax cuts; and privatization. A great debate ensued between government officials seeking reform and special interests that preferred the status quo.

Meanwhile, the government kept borrowing and spending and driving up inflation, which averaged 77 percent for 1978–79 and reached a peak of 450 percent in 1984–85. The government’s share of the economy grew to 76 percent, while fiscal deficits and national debt skyrocketed. The government printed money through loans from the Bank of Israel, which contributed to the inflation by churning out money.

Finally, in January 1983, the bubble burst, and thousands of private citizens and businesses as well as government-run enterprises faced bankruptcy. Israel was close to collapse. At this critical moment, a sympathetic U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, and his secretary of state, George Shultz, came to the rescue. They offered a grant of $1.5 billion if the Israeli government agreed to abandon its socialist rulebook and adopt some form of U.S.-style capitalism, using American-trained professionals.

The Histadrut strongly resisted, unwilling to give up their decades-old power and to concede that socialism was responsible for Israel’s economic troubles. However, the people had had enough of soaring inflation and non-existent growth and rejected the Histadrut’s policy of resistance. Still, the Israeli government hesitated, unwilling to spend political capital on economic reform. An exasperated Secretary Schulz informed Israel that if it did not begin freeing up the economy, the U.S. would freeze “all monetary transfers” to the country. The threat worked. The Israeli government officially adopted most of the free-market “recommendations.”

The impact of a basic shift in Israeli economic policy was immediate and pervasive. Within a year, inflation tumbled from 450 percent to just 20 percent, a budget deficit of 15 percent of GDP shrank to zero, the Histadrut’s economic and business empire disappeared along with its political domination, and the Israeli economy was opened to imports. Of particular importance was the Israeli high-tech revolution, which led to a 600 percent increase in investment in Israel, transforming the country into a major player in the high-tech world.

There were troubling side effects such as social gaps, poverty, and concerns about social justice, but the socialist rhetoric and ideology, according to Glenn Frankel, the Washington Post’s correspondent in Israel, “has been permanently retired.” The socialist Labor party endorsed privatization and the divestment of many publicly held companies that had become corrupted by featherbedding, rigid work rules, phony bookkeeping, favoritism, and incompetent managers.

After modest expansion in the 1990s, Israel’s economic growth topped the charts in the developing world in the 2000s, propelled by low inflation and a reduction in the size of government. Unemployment was still too high and taxes took up 40 percent of GDP, much of it caused by the need for a large military. However, political parties are agreed that there is no turning back to the economic policies of the early years—the debate is about the rate of further market reform. “The world’s most successful experiment in socialism,” Light wrote, “appears to have resolutely embraced capitalism.”

 

[FiveInch033]

India
Acceptance of socialism was strong in India long before independence, spurred by widespread resentment against British colonialism and the land-owning princely class (the zamindars) and by the efforts of the Communist Party of India, established in 1921. Jawaharlal Nehru adopted socialism as the ruling ideology when he became India’s first prime minister after independence in 1947.

For nearly 30 years, the Indian government adhered to a socialist line, restricting imports, prohibiting foreign direct investment, protecting small companies from competition from large corporations, and maintaining price controls on a wide variety of industries including steel, cement, fertilizers, petroleum, and pharmaceuticals. Any producer who exceeded their licensed capacity faced possible imprisonment.

As the Indian economist Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar wrote, “India was perhaps the only country in the world where improving productivity . . . was a crime.” It was a strict application of the socialist principle that the market cannot be trusted to produce good economic or social outcomes. Economic inequality was regulated through taxes—the top personal income tax rate hit a stifling 97.75 percent.

Some 14 public banks were nationalized in 1969; six more banks were taken over by the government in 1980. Driven by the principle of “self-reliance,” almost anything that could be produced domestically could not be imported regardless of the cost. It was the “zenith” of Indian socialism, which still failed to satisfy the basic needs of an ever expanding population. In 1977–78, more than half of India was living below the poverty line.

At the same time, notes Indian-American economist Arvind Panagariya, a series of external shocks shook the country, including a war with Pakistan in 1965, which came on the heels of a war with China in 1962; another war with Pakistan in 1971; consecutive droughts in 1971–72 and 1972–73, and the oil price crisis of October 1973, which contributed to a 40 percent deterioration in India’s foreign trade.

Economic performance from 1965 to 1981 was worse than than at any other time of the post-independence period. As in Israel, economic reform became an imperative. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had pushed her policy agenda as far to the left as possible. In 1980, the Congress party won a two-thirds majority in the Parliament, and Gandhi adopted, at last, a more pragmatic, non-ideological course. But as with everything else in India, economic reform proceeded slowly.

An industrial-policy statement continued the piecemeal retreat from socialism that had begun in 1975, allowing companies to expand their capacity, encouraging investment in a wide variety of industries, and introducing private-sector participation in telecommunications. Further liberalization received a major boost under Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded his mother in 1984 following her assassination. As a result, GDP growth reached an encouraging 5.5 percent.

Economics continued to trump ideology under Rajiv Gandhi, who was free of the socialist baggage carried by an earlier generation. His successor, P. V. Narasimha Rao, put an end to licensing except in selected sectors and opened the door to much wider foreign investment. Finance minister Manmohan Singh cut the tariff rates from an astronomical 355 percent to 65 percent. According to Arvind Panagariya, “the government had introduced enough liberalizing measures to set the economy on the course to sustaining approximately 6 percent growth on a long-term basis.” In fact, India’s GDP growth reached a peak of over 9 percent in 2005–8, followed by a dip to just under 7 percent in 2017–18.

A major development of the economic reforms was the remarkable expansion of India’s middle class. The Economist estimates there are 78 million Indians in the middle-middle and upper middle-class category. By including the lower middle class, Indian economists Krishnan and Hatekar figure that India’s new middle class grew from 304.2 million in 2004–5 to an amazing 606.3 million in 2011–12, almost one-half of the entire Indian population. The daily income of the three middle classes are lower middle, $2–$4; middle middle, $4–$6; upper middle, $6–$10.

While this is extremely low by U.S. standards, a dollar goes a long way in India, where the annual per capita income is approximately $6,500. If only half of the lower middle class makes the transition to upper-class or middle income, that would mean an Indian middle class of about 350 million Indians—a mid-point between The Economist and Krishnan and Hatekar estimates. Such an enormous middle class confirms the judgment of the Heritage Foundation, in its Index of Economic Freedom, that India is developing into an “open-market economy.”

In 2017, India overtook Germany to become the fourth-largest auto market in the world, and it is expected to displace Japan in 2020. That same year, India overtook the U.S. in smartphone sales to become the second-largest smartphone market in the world. Usually described as an agricultural country, India is today 31 percent urbanized. With an annual GDP of $8.7 trillion, India ranks fifth in the world, behind the United States, China, Japan, and Great Britain. Never before in recorded history, Indian economist Gurcharan Das has noted, have so many people risen so quickly.

All this has been accomplished because the political leaders of India sought and adopted a better economic system—free enterprise—after some four decades of fitful progress and unequal prosperity under socialism.

 

[FiveInch033]

United Kingdom
Widely described as “the sick man of Europe” after three decades of socialism, the United Kingdom underwent an economic revolution in the 1970s and 1980s because of one remarkable person—Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Some skeptics doubted that she could pull it off—the U.K. was then a mere shadow of its once prosperous free-market self.

The government owned the largest manufacturing firms in such industries as autos and steel. The top individual tax rates were 83 percent on “earned income” and a crushing 98 percent on income from capital. Much of the housing was government-owned. For decades, the U.K. had grown more slowly than economies on the continent. Great Britain was no longer “great” and seemed headed for the economic dust bin.

The major hindrance to economic reform was the powerful trade unions, which since 1913 had been allowed to spend union funds on political objectives, such as controlling the Labour party. Unions inhibited productivity and discouraged investment. From 1950 to 1975, the U.K.’s investment and productivity record was the worst of any major industrial country. Trade-union demands increased the size of the public sector and public expenditures to 59 percent of GDP. Wage and benefits demands by organized labor led to continual strikes that paralyzed transportation and production.

In 1978, Labour prime minister James Callaghan decided that, rather than hold an election, he would “soldier on” to the following spring. It was a fatal mistake. His government encountered the legendary “winter of discontent” in the first months of 1979. Public-sector workers went on strike for weeks. Mountains of uncollected rubbish piled high in cities. Bodies remained unburied and rats ran in the streets.

Newly elected Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom’s first female PM, took on what she considered her main opponent—the unions. Flying pickets, the ground troops of industrial conflict who would travel to support workers on strike at another site, were banned and could no longer blockade factories or ports. Strike ballots were made compulsory. The closed shop, which forced workers to join a union to get a job, was outlawed. Union membership plummeted from a peak of 12 million in the late 1970s to half that by the late 1980s. “It’s now or never for [our] economic policies,” Thatcher declared, “let’s stick to our guns.” The top rate of personal income tax was cut in half, to 45 percent, and exchange controls were abolished.

Privatization was a core Thatcher reform. Not only was it fundamental to the improvement of the economy. It was “one of the central means of reversing the corrosive and corrupting effects of socialism,” she wrote in her memoirs. Through privatization that leads to the widest possible ownership by members of the public, “the state’s power is reduced and the power of the people enhanced.” Privatization “is at the center of any programme of reclaiming territory for freedom.” She was as good as her word, selling off government-owned airlines, airports, utilities, and phone, steel, and oil companies.

In the 1980s, Britain’s economy grew faster than that of any other European economy except Spain. U.K. business investment grew faster than in any other country except Japan. Productivity grew faster than in any other industrial economy. Some 3.3 million new jobs were created between March 1983 and March 1990. Inflation fell from a high of 27 percent in 1975 to 2.5 percent in 1986. From 1981 to 1989, under a Conservative government, real GDP growth averaged 3.2 percent.

By the time Thatcher left government, the state-owned sector of industry had been reduced by some 60 percent. As she recounted in her memoirs, about one in four Britons owned shares in the market. Over 600,000 jobs had passed from the public to the private sector. The U.K. had “set a worldwide trend in privatization in countries as different as Czechoslovakia and New Zealand.” Turning decisively away from Keynesian management, the once sick man of Europe now bloomed with robust economic health. No succeeding British government, Labour or Conservative, has tried to renationalize what Margaret Thatcher denationalized.

China
How then to explain the impressive economic success of a fourth major economy, China, with annual GDP growth of 8 to 10 percent from the 1980s almost to the present? From 1949 to 1976, under Mao Zedong, China was an economic basket case, owing to Mao’s personal mismanagement of the economy. In his avid pursuit of Soviet-style socialism, Mao brought about the Great Leap Forward of 1958–60, which resulted in the deaths of at least 30 million and perhaps as many as 50 million Chinese, and the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76, in which an additional 3 million to 5 million died. Mao left China backward and deeply divided.

Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, turned China in a different direction, seeking to create a mixed economy in which capitalism and socialism would coexist with the Communist Party monitoring and constantly adjusting the proper mix. For the past four decades, China has been the economic marvel of the world for the following reasons:

It began its economic ascent almost from ground zero because of Mao’s ideological stubbornness. It has engaged in the calculated theft of intellectual property, especially from the U.S., for decades. It has taken full advantage of globalism and its membership in the World Trade Organization, while ignoring the prescribed rules against such practices as intellectual-property theft. It has used tariffs and other protectionist measures to gain trade advantages with the U.S. and other competitors.

It created a middle class of some 300 million people, who enjoy a decent living and at the same time constitute a sizable domestic market for goods and services. It continues to use the forced labor of the laogai to make cheap consumer goods that are sold in Walmart and other Western stores. It allows an enormous black market to exist because Party members profit from its sales.

It permits foreign investors to buy into Chinese companies, but the government—i.e., the Communist Party—always retains a majority interest. It operates an estimated 150,000 state-owned enterprises that guarantee jobs for tens of millions of Chinese. It depends on the energy and experience of the most entrepreneurial people in the world, second only to Americans.

In short, the People’s Republic of China was an economic failure for its first three decades under Mao and Soviet socialism. It began its climb to become the second-largest economy in the world when it abandoned socialism in the late Seventies and initiated its experiment, which so far has been successful, in capitalism with Chinese characteristics.

There are clear signs that such success is no longer automatic. China is experiencing a slowing economy, is ruled by a dictatorial but divided Communist Party clinging to power, faces widespread public demands for the guarantee of fundamental human rights, and suffers from a seriously degraded environment. History suggests that these problems can best be solved by a democratic government ruled by the people, not a one-party authoritarian state that resorts to violence in a crisis, as Beijing did at Tiananmen Square and is doing in Hong Kong.

Conclusion
As we have seen from our examination of Israel, India, and the United Kingdom, the economic system that works best for the greatest number is not socialism with its central controls, utopian promises, and OPM (other people’s money), but the free-market system with its emphasis on competition and entrepreneurship. All three countries tried socialism for decades, and all three finally rejected it for the simplest of reasons—it doesn’t work.

Socialism is guilty of a fatal conceit: It believes its system can make better decisions for the people than they can for themselves. It is the end product of a 19th-century prophet whose prophecies (such as the inevitable disappearance of the middle class) have been proven wrong time and again.

According to the World Bank, more than one billion people have lifted themselves out of poverty in the past 25 years, “one of the greatest human achievements of our time.” Of those billion, approximately 731 million are Chinese, and 168 million Indians. The main driver of this uplift from poverty has been the globalization of the international trading system. China owes most of its success to the trade freedom offered by the U.S. and the rest of the world. The latest edition of Index of Economic Freedom from the Heritage Foundation confirms the global trend toward economic freedom: Economies rated “free” or “mostly free” enjoy incomes that are more than five times higher than the incomes of “repressed economies” such as those of North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba.

Israel’s socialist miracle turned out to be a mirage, India discarded socialist ideology and chose a more market-oriented path, and the United Kingdom set an example for the rest of the world with its emphasis on privatization and deregulation. Whether we are talking about the actions of an agricultural country of 1.3 billion, or the nation that sparked the industrial revolution, or a small Middle Eastern country populated by some of the smartest people in the world, capitalism tops socialism every time.

 

[eric_erosfan]

Has your tiny dick finally put you in a mental hospital?

 

[FiveInch033]

China’s Deep Economic Crisis — And A Trade War It Can’t Win​

Prof. Vidhu Shekhar
Apr 11, 2025, 11:10 AM | Updated 01:55 PM IST


https://swarajya.gumlet.io/swarajya/2025-04-11/0uy3986z/China-Fragile-Giant.jpg?w=610&q=50&compress=true&format=auto
The double-digit growth era is far gone and 5% is becoming difficult.

• Trump has forced China into a tariff war that it can neither afford nor win. The timing could not have been worse for Beijing, given its economic fragility.

China’s economy is unravelling — not through a sudden crash, but by slow, systemic suffocation. Beneath the façade of 5% growth lies mounting debt and entrenched deflation. The deeper danger isn't immediate collapse but a prolonged zombie-like stagnation that spreads risks across the global economy.
In late 2024, China announced that its economy grew by 5% for the year. At first glance, this seemed like good news. The world’s second-largest economy appeared stable and a working engine in uncertain times.
But behind the headlines, the reality is very different. Foreign investors are pulling out. Youth unemployment is rising fast. Big real estate companies are collapsing. And prices, both at factories and in shops, are steadily falling.
What’s going wrong?
A Growth Story That No Longer Adds Up
While the double-digit growth era is far gone, China’s leaders have kept their aim fixed at a 5% annual growth rate. A fair number for the size of the Chinese economy, 5% growth has become a political priority.
But the actual economic activity that people feel — in terms of wages, prices, and business earnings — tells a different story.
What is further interesting to note is that in 2024, China’s nominal GDP grew just 4.2%, as against the real GDP growth of 5%. Typically, nominal GDP grows faster than real GDP because it includes inflation.
Here, a lower nominal GDP suggests that prices are falling across the board, signalling what is known as deflation — something that economists fear much more than inflation, for it represents an utterly stagnating economy.
Further to this, independent groups like the Rhodium Group estimate that China’s real growth has likely been between 2.4% and 2.8%, far lower than the official number. And that is with significant government support behind the scenes.
In short, the headline number may look okay, but the economy underneath is slowing down and is deeply stressed.
An Economy Stuck: Spiral of Debt, Overcapacity, and Declining Confidence
China’s rapid growth over the past two decades was powered by aggressive borrowing across all segments — households, companies, and local governments. But now, the weight of that debt is choking the system.
Households owe between 60–64% of GDP, mainly in mortgages. But home prices have fallen for 20 straight months, and many families are seeing the value of their biggest asset decline.
With loan EMIs eating up over half of many families’ monthly income, there’s little room left for spending. That makes any serious revival in consumption, a key government priority, extremely difficult.
Corporate debt levels are even higher, ranging from 123% to 172% of GDP. A significant share is concentrated in Local Government Financing Vehicles (LGFVs), which are opaque entities that funded the infrastructure boom.
These vehicles are deeply in debt and, in many cases, insolvent. But letting them fail risks local banking crises, while bailing them out deepens the national debt burden.
China now finds itself in a debt trap: too leveraged to grow fast, too fragile to clean up the mess.
Meanwhile, years of industrial investment have created massive overcapacity, especially in sectors like electric vehicles, solar panels, steel, and semiconductors.
In many cases, production exceeds not just domestic needs but global demand itself. Factories keep running because shutting them down would result in sunk fixed costs and trigger layoffs and social issues.
But this continued output is worsening a deflationary spiral: prices are falling, profits are vanishing, and demand is shrinking. Producer prices have declined for more than a year, and consumer prices fell 0.7% in February 2025.
The property market, long the engine of Chinese household wealth, is also now a liability. Developers like Evergrande and Country Garden have defaulted, leaving banks exposed to severe bad loans.
Construction has slowed sharply. Land sales, a key source of local government revenue, have dried up, compounding fiscal strain.
This downturn is especially harsh on the younger generation. Youth unemployment stands officially at 16.9%, but estimates run far higher, especially in cities.
Many young, educated Chinese have joined the ranks of the so-called “professional children” — adults who live with and depend on their parents, unable to find jobs or build independent lives.
What was once a confident, aspirational generation is now marked by disillusionment and social withdrawal.
This is not a cyclical downturn. It is a structural slowdown, with debt, deflation, overcapacity, and joblessness reinforcing one another. The machine has not crashed but is seizing up in slow motion.
Policy Fatigue: Why the Old Tools Do Not Work Anymore
Beijing has responded with familiar tools — rate cuts, liquidity injections, and infrastructure stimulus — but none are working as they once did.
The People’s Bank of China has eased its policy, cutting interest rates and reserve requirements. However, with households and firms already overleveraged, monetary policy has lost traction.
Banks are cautious. Borrowers are hesitant. Cheaper credit is no longer translating into economic momentum.
Fear of runaway inflation has kept fiscal stimulus largely focused on supply-side spending and infrastructure and industrial upgrades. Direct support to households, which could possibly revive demand — albeit at the cost of inflation — remains minimal.
Local governments are effectively immobilized. Saddled with debt and falling land revenues, they are scaling back services and lack the capacity to support recovery. Their paralysis has become a major drag on national policy execution.
Across the economy, developers are insolvent, consumers are cautious, and private investment is subdued. Every channel that might transmit stimulus — banking, local government, household consumption — is blocked or compromised.
The leadership now faces a structural dilemma: inflate the debt bubble further to preserve stability or allow defaults and risk contagion. So far, it has chosen a third path — incremental containment, which avoids crisis but also defers resolution.
The problem is not that policy tools are gone. It is that they no longer work under current conditions. Interest rate cuts do not spark borrowing. Infrastructure spending does not lift consumption.
What remains is policy inertia and the quiet normalization of stagnation.
A Trade War at the Worst Time
Just as China wrestles with deflation, overcapacity, and crumbling confidence, the U.S. has reignited a trade war.
President Trump’s 2025 “reciprocal tariff” regime may echo 2018, but the global context has completely changed. Back then, tariffs sparked fears of inflation. Today, they weaponize deflation. And in a deflationary world, tariffs don’t raise prices; they crush the weakest supplier.
With factories running far above demand and prices already falling, Chinese exporters have no leverage. Their pricing power is gone, and their negotiating position is desperate. To stay afloat, they would even be willing to absorb the cost of tariffs through deeper discounts, squeezed profits, or a weaker yuan.
Beijing, meanwhile, has few viable counters. It imports too little from the U.S. to retaliate meaningfully. Currency devaluation risks capital flight.
Threatening export bans — such as of rare earths and pharma inputs — will further accelerate global diversification. While they are still projecting strength, it masks a shrinking toolbox.
This is a trade war China cannot afford and cannot win. The timing could not have been worse.
The World with China in Crisis
China’s economic crisis is not a story of sudden collapse. It is a slow-burning structural unraveling.
A high-debt, deflation-prone, demographically aging, and policy-constrained economy can no longer rely on the tools that once delivered breakneck growth.
The engine is running, but the transmission is broken. Output exists, but momentum is gone.
The deeper danger lies not in volatility but in stagnation that drags on, is difficult to reverse, is resistant to reform, and is increasingly visible on the world stage.
China's problems are already shaping global trade patterns, supply chain shifts, capital flows, and commodity demand. Its inability to revive domestic consumption or contain financial risks now poses a global threat.
The world once feared a relentlessly rising China. It must now contend with a fragile, inward-looking, and financially constrained one. And fragility at this scale, in the world’s second-largest economy, does not stay isolated.
The China boom changed the world. The Chinese structural slowdown will as well — just in more uncertain and uneven ways

 

[FiveInch033]

Has your tiny dick finally put you in a mental hospital?

Ridicule??? Typical. I thought the left was "open minded"?
Except of course when someone proves their religion of Marx is a terrible one.

 

[FiveInch033]

Ridicule??? Typical. I thought the left was "open minded"?
Except of course when someone proves their religion of Marx is a terrible one.

The people that need to be in a mental hospital is anyone who believes any form of Marxism works.

 

[FiveInch033]

Communist China against Sparrows....led to famine...oops

 

[FiveInch033]

Socialism has worked GREAT...cough cough...in Cuba

In the sky of the El Vedado business district in Havana the Torre K Hotel stands out, a mass of cement that many Cubans ask why, and under what reasoning, it was built where it was. In 2018, the Gaviota hotel group, owned by the business and military conglomerate Gaesa, began to erect the 154-meter-high, 42-story construction, located in front of the Coppelia ice cream parlor, next to the Habana Libre hotel, a few blocks from the University of Havana and next to El Quijote Park. The controversial Torre K Hotel swept away any architectural rules, obstructed the views of residents, and has forced them to breathe cement for longer than agreed. A few days ago, a company announced on Facebook that it would not be long before the Torre K Hotel would finally “illuminate the nights of Vedado.” But the announcement of its early opening has ignited the debate that started the day they put the first foundation block in the ground: How to justify the continued construction of hotels in a country that is mired in poverty?

Some comments in response to the post highlight the obvious: “A hotel, with the misery in which Cubans live,” read one. Another said that the hotel was going to be a sort of “rechargeable lamp erected in the heart of Vedado,” which will illuminate the city night in the middle of a blackout. This is what worries Cubans: the construction of the hotel underlines the contrast of a life of shortages, which can be summarized in lack of food, constant power cuts, low salaries doubly minimized by inflation, and discontent with the government.


These shortages are also reflected in the seventh edition of a study called “The State of Social Rights in Cuba,” conducted by the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH), an independent organization based in Madrid. The report states that in 2024, 89% of the Cuban population will live in conditions of “extreme poverty.” This comes at a time when the island is experiencing an economic crisis that, according to experts, is already more serious than that of the early 1990s. The study also revealed that 86% of Cuban households exist “on the margins of survival” and that, of these, 61% do not even have enough “to buy the essentials to survive.”

The OCDH conducted more than 1,000 interviews with people over 18 years of age in 78 municipalities in the country. “These data have helped us to question the misnamed ‘social pact’ through which Cubans gave up their civil and political rights in exchange for other rights such as labor, cultural, and social rights,” Alejandro González Raga, executive director of the Observatory, told EL PAÍS. Raga explained that the objective of this type of study is to provide transparency in the face of opacity, manipulation, or scarcity of public information. “Our biggest aspiration is that these data also contribute, so that the population is given an answer with effective measures, something that unfortunately doesn’t happen.”

The results revealed that 72% of those surveyed consider the food crisis the main problem, and that seven out of 10 Cubans have stopped eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner due to lack of money or food shortages. Only 15% were able to eat three meals a day on a regular basis. The age group most affected when it comes to putting food on the table is, according to the study, those aged over 70.

After food, the issues that most worry Cubans today are blackouts, followed by the cost of living — exacerbated by up to three-digit inflation rates that have been reported in the country — as well as low salaries, corruption, and the state of public health. It is precisely the lack of medicines, the deterioration of hospitals, and the lack of supplies that are the providing a major source of concern for citizens in a country that once called itself a “medical powerhouse.” The study notes that 38% of elderly participants were unable to obtain medicines, most of them because of the cost but others due to shortages.

In addition, the figures also confirm that those who are able to live more comfortably in Cuba receive remittances from overseas, which allow them to buy and access basic products in non-state sector stores. On the contrary, those who are “having a worse time” are those who do not receive remittances (61%) — in this case, the majority are black Cubans — followed by the unemployed (44%) and prisoners (26%).

91% of Cubans disapprove of “the government’s economic and social management”​

“The increasing depreciation of the Cuban peso has hit the vast majority of households hard. And although family remittances have a considerable positive influence on the households that receive them (which represent only 24% of the population), shortages or increases in the price of basic products and services also limit these families,” the report states. Added to this panorama is the unemployment rate: 12% of participants said they are unemployed and 69% of them have been out of work for over a year.

The numbers only confirm the dissatisfaction with the government that Cubans have expressed as never before in several anti-system protests in recent years. Ninety-one percent disapprove of “the government’s economic and social management,” while only 4% rated it as “favorable.” On the other hand, 3% believe that the current Cuban model “should be the reference for future development.”

These levels of precariousness are not something that the government has been able to hide or disguise. At the beginning of the year, for the first time, Cuban authorities had to request “urgent” assistance from the World Food Program to provide milk for children aged under seven. At that time, Minister of Labor and Social Security Marta Elena Feitó Cabrera acknowledged that some 1,236 communities in the country live in poverty. Cuba has also assumed the top-ranking spots in the world’s poverty surveys. In 2023, the firm DatoWorld revealed that Cuba was the poorest country in Latin America, ahead of Venezuela and Honduras. In 2022, the island was given the “inglorious title of 2021′s most-miserable country” by the annual Hanke’s Misery Index.

In a country with an economy that has contracted by 2%, where precariousness levels are the order of the day, its citizens have responded by staging the largest exodus in its history over the past three years. According to recent estimates by Cuban anthropologist and economist Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos, the Cuban population has fallen by 18% and today only 8.62 million people live on the island. The rest have sought an escape from misery.

 

[FiveInch033]

In 1977 people thought we'd all die of an Ice Age....didn't happen. But the solution was Socialism. Hmmm. Seems global warming and "climate change" has the same solution. Maybe these are made up.

 

[stxjimmy]

A rambling waste of an afternoon.