[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> I agree with much of Ed's analysis. I wonder though what would have
> happened if the USSR had responded to the spending of "star wars" by
> declaring that they would unilaterally disarm. What would the US military
> industrial complex have done? What would have happened to the US economy?
> And the stock markets?
My guess is that The United States would have "put the screws to"
The USSR even tighter than it already was. The "liberation" of
all people under Communist rule has always been our policy.
I think The Soviet Union was in a lose/lose situation: If they
tried to opt out of the arms race "we" would put more pressure
on them to try to make them shrivel up and suffocate
altogether. If they kept in the arms race, they would go
bankrupt. Isn't the denouement of this
double-bind where Gorbechav(sp?) came in?
No way would "The West" consider trying to
bring "socialism with a human face" to *both* sides
of The Iron Curtain, so there never was any
possibility of a constructive synthesis between
us and them!
Nietzsche proposed that world peace would come about when one
nation became so powerful that it was invincible, and then *it*
decided that living that way was not the way to live. The Soviet
Union never was in that position. The United States probably was (and
maybe it still is???)
[snip]
> Brad wrote:
> >
> > This seems to me to be one key aspect of Anglo-American anti-Communism
> that
> > was so cleverly implemented (or was it truly an unwitting effect of
> > the agent-less agency of The Invisible Hand, thus showing, yet again,
> > that, as Hegel wrote: The history of the world is the world history
> > of Reason???) -- this capitalist strategy was so cleverly implemented
> > that nobody seemed to notice it at the time, neither the Soviets
> > and their apologists, nor the "revisionists" here in The West (e.g.,
> > D.F. Fleming). Or maybe the Soviets *did* realize it, but they also
> > realized that there would be no useful point served by saying they did?
> >
>
> I don't think it quite happened this way. My understanding is that the
> military-industrial sector of the Soviet economy, including the space
> program, was relatively efficient even if compared with the advanced
> economies of the west. It was the rest of the economy which wasn't working,
> and which would likely have ground down even if there had not been a cold
> war. The absence of a market based price mechanism meant that the terms of
> exchange for almost all goods and services had to be determined by a huge
> central planning bureaucracy. The bigger and more complex the economy
> became, the bigger and more complex this bureaucracy had to be.
[snip]
I don't think it was a question of how "efficient" (by whatever
metrics...) the Soviet military and space programs were. I think it
was a question of relative *size*. No matter how efficient they
were, we were big enough that they couldn't ever catch up. Any efficiencies
they achieved just prolonged the time until they collapsed from
exhaustion.
As far as central planning vs "markets" is concerned, it does seem
that The Soviet Union had a lot of inefficiencies. And, surely,
The West would have loved for The Soviet Union to produce
consumer trinkets -- better: if Russia would have remained
a pre-industrial society, and just let big corporations come in and extract
raw materials -- rather than Russia industrializing and
producing its own steel, etc. I've always thought Stalin was
a Russian nationalist, not any kind of communist.
In general, I am completely baffled how anyone can think that
centralized planning is not the only way to go
("The bigger and more complex the economy
[becomes], the bigger and more complex [coordination has] to be").
Competition produces waste. Are HMO's really
mechanisms for *increasing* free enterprise
in medicine beyond the limits of the old regime of doctors as independent
practitioners?
"Deregulation" is merely a way to shift the locus of control
away from structures with even nominal accountability to
"the people", toward autarchies. "Here", a centralized planning
bureaucracy like United Airlines wears the mask of being a "private
company competing in a free market", and, as Bill Gates continues
to point out to everyone, the "government" needs to stop
meddling.
"Just in time" production may be what Communism needed to
process the amount of data required to run a modern
centralized state of >> 100,000,000 people. The United States
seems to me to be moving toward total centralized administration
by an invisible *silicon* hand.
Fly the centrally managed skies of United Airlines,
where every seat on every flight is micromanaged,
etc. (We have always known that "competition" is what
every capitalist enterprise tries to eliminate, so that it
can rationalize its operations. My markets are mine to
control, and your markets are the arena for competition,
unless you want to make a deal to divide up your
market between us in a way that's rational for my company....)
[snip]
I wonder what The United States would be like to live in if
we were pushed up against the wall like The Soviet Union
always was. Did the people in the Soviet "apparatus" --
their "middle managers" --
really have such bad standard of living? How much
freedom do most Americans really have, when their livelihood
is dependent on their managers' dictates? It seems to me
that being an employee of a "private"
corporation is structurally far more like being an
employee of a state enterprise, than being either one is like
being self-employed in a peer community of similarly self-employed
individuals.
+\brad mccormick
--
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
[ I am looking for a Waltham Premier Maximus pocket watch in
excellent condition. Any "leads" much appreciated. Thank you. ]
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
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