From: Thomas Buckner (tcbevolver@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Nov 08 2004 - 17:46:25 MST
--- David Clark <clarkd@rccconsulting.com> wrote:
> Wealth (in the Western World) is primarily
> generated by thinking minds. (A
> case in point is the relatively low natural
> resources available in Japan and
> their relatively high degree of wealth.)
snip
> Socialism has been shown to fail, everywhere it
> has been tried around the
> world. There is a huge amount of evidence that
> shows that the greatest
> "wealth" and highest standards of living for
> all are created where free
> enterprise reins and socialism is minimized. (I
> realize that true socialism
> or true free enterprise don't exist anywhere,
> so I am talking in relative
> terms.)
My brother-in-law lives in Japan and calls it
"the world's most successful communist country."
He has no plans to return to the US where
"everyone is five or six steps from being
homeless."
In Sweden, the social welfare system goes, as
they joke, "from erection to resurrection."
What you call 'failed socialism' is the overly
centralized command economies of the Marxist
states where despotism and information
bottlenecks strangled the economy and the
ambition of the people. Some 'socialistic'
countries, especially Venezuela under Hugo Chavez
and Libya under Kaddafi, are run a lot better
than Western/World Bank propaganda would have you
believe.
My point is that I believe you are falling into
the 'fallacy of the excluded middle' which so
many economic Ayn Randians indulge. Excessive
concentration of private wealth is just as
undesirable as the excessive concentration of
'state wealth' in a Stalinist state. In the
middle, however, we find the most livable
societies. Socialism is not a dirty word in
Europe.
I will not post further on this topic because I
lived in Cambridge and know how Marx-vs.-Adam
Smith debates can rage until dawn, to no point.
Tom Buckner
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