May 1, 2006
ONE CAN'T EXPECT TO MAKE A GULAG WITHOUT EGALITIE:
Where Are the Omelets? (Lawrence W. Reed, October 1999, The Freeman)
On ne saurait faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs.” Translation: “One can’t expect to make an omelet without breaking eggs.”With those words in 1790, Maximilian Robespierre welcomed the horrific French Revolution that had begun the year before. A consummate statist who worked tirelessly to plan the lives of others, he would become the architect of the Revolution’s bloodiest phase—the Reign of Terror of 1793–94. Robespierre and his guillotine broke eggs by the thousands in a vain effort to impose a utopian society based on the seductive slogan “liberté, égalité, fraternité.”
But, alas, Robespierre never made a single omelet. Nor did any of the other thugs who held power in the decade after 1789. They left France in moral, political, and economic ruin, and ripe for the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte.
As with Robespierre, no omelets came from the egg-breaking efforts of Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini either. [...]
In The New Yorker in 1984, John Kenneth Galbraith argued that the Soviet Union was making great economic progress in part because the socialist system made “full use” of its manpower, in contrast to the less efficient capitalist West. But an 846-page authoritative study published in 1997, The Black Book of Communism, estimated that the communist ideology claimed 20 million lives in the “workers’ paradise.” Similarly, The Black Book documented the death tolls in other communist lands: 45 to 72 million in China, between 1.3 million and 2.3 million in Cambodia, 2 million in North Korea, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 1 million in Vietnam, 1 million in Eastern Europe, and 150,000 in Latin America.
Additionally, all of those murderous regimes were economic basket cases; they squandered resources on the police and military, built vast and incompetent bureaucracies, and produced almost nothing for which there was a market beyond their borders. They didn’t make “full use” of anything except police power. In every single communist country the world over, the story has been the same: lots of broken eggs, no omelets. No exceptions.
Reading the plaudits for Mr. Galbraith is especially amusing since he got the only important question in human affairs wrong and spent his life pimping for the French mania for absolute economic security. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 1, 2006 12:06 PM
"John Kenneth Galbraith argued that the Soviet Union was making great economic progress in part because the socialist system made full use of its manpower" The capitalists made "full use" of their brain power and let machines do the work.
Posted by: ic at May 1, 2006 1:17 PMI just finished A Terrible Beauty, a very long and exhaustive synopsis of all the principal and even obscure genius' and opinion-makers of the 20th century in fields as broad as science, arts, politics, economics and even popular entertainment. It's hardly conservative (The chapter on AIDS and sexual liberation is entitled "The Wages of Repression"), but it is 99% descriptive and therefore pretty inoffensive and interesting.
The first thing that strikes is how much cutting- edged, wildly popular thinking soon disappeared down some black hole, never to be heard from again. But the second is how many attacks on capitalism there were in so many different fields and guises. "Capitalism and Alienation", Capitalism and Women", "Capitalism and Psoriasis", etc.---it just went on and on forever among the cognascenti with hardly any dissenters. In fact, forget economic performance, the fact that capitalism withstood such an onslaught is proof itself of its strength.
Compared to much of what was going on, Galbraith was a prissy old toady.
Posted by: Peter B at May 1, 2006 2:06 PM
Full Use of Manpower Redux:
A long time ago, we were having dinner at my parents house with a high official of the Albanian delegation to the U.N. He was some sort of cousin. With him was his Lon Chaney look-alike chauffeur who was seated at the table with us, much to my mother's horror. No family members were with him, they stayed home to insure he wouldn't defect.
It was during the period in Albania when the Chinese somehow were in charge? Don't ask.
The conversation was amusing in the extreme. He was telling of the many large projects like dams and the like being built entirely with human labor, no sissy heavy machinery for our homeboys. We sat there politely with straight faces while being told that building things with pails and shovels instead of bulldozers builds character.
It was ridiculous then and even more ridiculous now. BTW - this exemplary comrade did defect and his family suffered for it. So much for ideology.
Peter B:
Intellectuals hate capitalism because they can't direct it, it does not primarily depend on articulation, it seems capricious and imperfect (i.e., not the way they would design things), and it works (the worst part of all).
Posted by: Matt Murphy at May 1, 2006 3:15 PMFrom the LA Times article on Galbraith yesterday:
"I am struck by our superb capacity to manufacture consumer gadgetry, including electronic games, versus our capacity to produce schools."
Only an intellectual could write something like this and simultaneously think that the problem is that Corporations Are Bad, and Government Is Good.
Posted by: b at May 1, 2006 3:34 PMIn every single communist country the world over, the story has been the same: lots of broken eggs, no omelets. No exceptions.
One of those insights that we all probably already had, but stated more directly and more forcefully than you're used to hearing. Wow.
Posted by: Mike Morley at May 1, 2006 4:28 PM