[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Taking the example of Stalin's war on the peasantry in general and the
Ukraine in particular, we see that massive confiscations of income at
marginal rates well in excess of 100% certainly detered economic
activity, to put it rather mildly.
Yes, but ag collectivization in the USSR DID raise additional government
revenue, at least in the short-run. The people starved, production
fell, but Stalin got more grain to feed the cities and export. At least
that's my recollection from Conquest.
Of course, productivity growth in agriculture was very low afterwards,
fitting my long-run Laffer curve story!
--
Prof. Bryan Caplan
Department of Economics George Mason University
http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://econlog.econlib.org
"[M]uch of the advice from the parenting experts is flapdoodle.
But surely the advice is grounded in research on children's
development? Yes, from the many useless studies that show
a correlation between the behavior of parents and the
behavior of their biological children and conclude that
parenting shapes the child, as if there were no such thing as
heredity."
--Steven Pinker, *The Blank Slate*
