Was watching Glenn Beck as he was describing "state capitalism." Honestly, I think he sometimes takes the longest and most complicated route to explaining things. Like the way he struggled with "monetizing the debt." But maybe he was too young to remember exactly what inflation was like in the 1970s, so he goes through three or four chalkboards and lots of graphics when he could have just said "flooding the globe with lots of paper dollars seriously dilutes the value of each individual dollar."
Anyway, back to state capitalism. Which sounds to me like a contradiction in terms. Like "socialist-anarchists." That's actually laughable.
Look, if you have "state capitalism" that means the state essentially owns everything -- going by a strict definition of "own," which means to have the right to determine a thing's use -- though citizens get to run it day-to-day. When it comes to big decisions, the government steps in with regulations and so forth. Strikes me that it's a total recipe for clinical stress, stress being when you have a lot of responsibility and no authority. You don't get to make any decisions, but everything is all your fault.
What a dream world, huh? Wouldn't you want to live there? Sorta like heading up a pharmaceutical company, isn't it? Or a bank. Or GM. Or anyplace that hires people or serves food.
I've mentioned this book before, but actually found it in my library -- The Russians, by Hedrick Smith, who was the New York Times (I think) bureau chief in Moscow for many years when it was the USSR. He wrote the book about everyday life in a "state capitalist" culture. He doesn't really go for the outrages and shocking rights violations so much as he just talks about the routine stuff, like toilet paper not being available to buy all the time -- or anything else. The central planning committee just had bigger fish to fry.
That's what you get with a centrally-controlled economy. Believe it was in this book that he talks about how Russian women complained that the clothes in the stores were unfashionable, unattractive, etc etc. So the state's central committee really made an effort to respond to these complaints and one year came out with something like a dozen different dress styles you could buy. When they were available. Somehow a dozen different styles really didn't solve the problem. They still all looked like cut-out dolls.
Don't even have to go so far afield. Anyone else remember when Nixon froze prices? That was interesting. At the time I worked for a company that made equipment used mainly for aircraft maintenance. (No, not factory work; I worked in the Engineering Office.) Anyway, so Nixon froze prices and everything else.
I used to have lunch every so often with the company's purchasing agent. Almost always when a salesman invited her to lunch, because her husband was the production manager and didn't want her going to lunch alone with the salesmen. So, anyway, this company used a lot of steel for manufacturing, and we sold an awful lot of stuff to the military. But when Nixon put the freeze on, the mills were apparently in process of making rolled steel -- like pipes and stuff -- and we needed flat steel. And couldn't get it. Because there was a freeze, and the steel companies couldn't make it. They couldn't even allow buyers to bid up the price for whatever inventory they might have for flat steel, or not legally anyway, because of the price freeze. The only reason my company got any flat steel was when we could prove it was to produce something the feds had ordered. You like that scenario?
I mean, a centrally-controlled economy is just exactly that stupid and inflexible. One size fits all, they say, it's more efficient that way. Except that it just doesn't work when you're dealing with human beings in a civilized society. Introduce freedom and free markets, and everyone's happy and much, much more productive. Suddenly there's tons of options for everything, lots of jobs, everyone has money to spend. You get the idea.
And anarchist-socialists, like those poop-for-brains currently burning down London because suddenly they're threatened with having pay something for a college education... What the hell kind of an education are they getting? Anarchy is just about the diametric opposite of socialism. Anarchy is the absence of government. Socialism is having a very tightly centralized and authoritarian government that divvies up and redistributes the goods. You can't have both at the same time. It just isn't possible.
Anyway, that's enough for now.
Save the Republic.
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