Let's have a peek at parts of the latest article that Mike has posted:
>THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY, London, September 6, 1998
>
>Ian Aitken - God save Mother Russia from free market quackery
>
> UNTIL BILL CLINTON went to Moscow last
> week it had never occurred to me to compare
> him to Dr Pangloss. But reading his preposterous
> homily to the long-suffering Russian people, in
> which he urged them to keep on swallowing the
> medicine that had already reduced most of them
> to penury, it was impossible not to think of
> Voltaire's great comic antihero. Here was a
> reincarnation of the good doctor, standing amid
> the ruins of the Lisbon earthquake and uttering his
> mantra: "All is for the best in the best of all
> possible worlds."
God forbid that I should be a defender of Bill Clinton but what he said
wasn't preposterous at all. But what he should have said is: as well as the
free market Russia needs a fair property law for all AND Presidents and
bureaucracies that abide by their own constitution AND an impartial
judicial system.
If that had been so then hundreds of thousands of small businesses would
have come into existence in the last five years, and tens of thousands of
small and medium-sized business that actually managed to would not be
disappearing right now leaving their enterprising owners in penury.
> The spectacle might even have been funny if it had
> not been so terrifying. God knows what idiot
> wrote the speech for him, but Clinton himself
> should have had enough savvy to see, at the very
> least, how insensitive it was. Free market, indeed!
> When even Gasprom, Russia's natural gas
> company, is having to conduct 80 per cent of its
> business by means of crude barter - for the simple
> reason that neither it nor its customers have any
> actual cash.
Complete non sequitur! What has this got to do with his argument? Barter is
perfectly all right as free trade. Of course, it's not as efficient as
trade that uses reliable money, but it's still free trade.
> Though he does not seem to have noticed, what
> Clinton was actually talking about wasn't so much
> a free market economy as a system which has
> become known to Russians as "bandit capitalism".
> It is a system in which Boris Yeltsin's backers
> have become repellently rich by asset-stripping
> the nation's industry while pauperising their fellow
> citizens. And unlike the bandit capitalists who built
> America but salved their consciences by way of
> wholesale philanthropy, they have not given a
> kopek back to the people they have robbed.
Ah, but they have! Once again, I don't want to be seen defending oligarchs
-- any more than Clinton -- but many Russian businesses give quite large
sums of voluntary taxation to their local governments in lieu of being
officially taxed by the central state. These owners know as well as
everybody else that if they continually take profits out of the local
economy then everybody loses in due course -- including themselves.
Why should Russian businespeople be less rational than businesspeople in
the West? Ian Aitken is now falling into same patronising mode with which
he charges Clinton and other Western spokespeople.
Why most Russian businesspeople object to paying taxation to the centre is
that most of it simply gets lost. Here's an example -- and a mild one, too.
When, in 1997, Yeltsin allocated $3 billion for the restoration of Chechnya
after the recent war, $1 billion immediately disappeared within government
departments without any form of documentation, and most of $2 billion
circulated round and round within Moscow until it was all gone. Much less
than 1% of the original $3 billion actually reached Chechnya.
> The point was well made a day or two before the
> Clinton circus arrived in Moscow by the
> communist leader, Gennady Zyuganov. He was
> reported in the International Herald Tribune as
> telling a gathering of Russian businessmen: "Your
> Russian predecessors in the first 15 years of this
> century were unable to share power or property.
> In the West they understood the need to share
> 200 years ago. Those who didn't share either had
> their crowns or their heads removed. Now you
> are acting exactly the same way."
Gennady Zyganov is about the only politician in Moscow who has been talking
sense in the last few weeks of the crisis -- and he's certainly frightened
Berezovsky and the other (several thousand) oligarchs (as they deserve to
be). But no one should think that Zyganov, unhumorous as he looks, and
probably is, is leading some sort of dirigiste old-fashioned Communist
Party. He's not; the elected representatives of the Communist Party in the
Duma contain an astonishingly wide spectrum of individuals from hard-line
Marxist-Leninists (only a small number) to liberal supporters of small and
medium businesses who would be called Social Democrats in the UK or
Democrats in the US.
> It [The UK Labour Party] could have countered the Thatcher-Reagan
> offensive with a modest campaign of its own. It
> might have sidled up to a few hapless Russian
> apparatchiks (most of whom were punch drunk
> from the free market onslaught) and pointed out
> that the state intervention and controlled financial
> system such as Britain had in 1945 would be
> much better suited to a country with no
> experience of markets whatever.
This is where Ian Aitken and pretty well all Western economic journalists,
spokespeople, think-tankers and Labour politicians are now charging like
sheep to a viewpoint quite opposite from what they were saying only a few
weeks ago. They're saying: Russia doesn't need "Western capitalism" or the
"Free Market" -- but a good strong dose of state control! But this is what
Russians have been trying to escape from! If the Russian do what many in
the West are now telling them, they would find themselves with even more
bureaucrats on the make, even more government cronies, even fewer decisions
made, and needing even more taxpayers' money to keep themselves in perks.
> God save us - and Mother Russia too - from such
> quackery. But would it not be a rare irony if it
> turned out to be the collapse of Soviet
> communism - and not its success - which
> precipitated the ultimate crisis of capitalism?
> Listen! Is that raucous laughter I hear from
> Highgate cemetery?
What a silly note to end on! As Ed Weick pointed out recently on
Futurework, capitalism has existed since the earliest days of man -- when
he spent time (capital) fashioning flint arrowheads in order to trade with
the neighbouring tribe -- and has existed ever since, and will always exist
,'cos capital will always be required for any form of economic development.
Throuhgout the history of makind capitalism has never been in any crisis
except relatively locally when it was persecuted or over-taxed by
governments that exceeded their basic functions (protection of society) and
became greedy. Moreover, as long as mankind wants to improve his condition,
there never will be an "ultimate" crisis of capitalism. What there will be,
however, are crises in various forms of types of governments that have
become inappropriate or seriously corrupt.
This is what Russia is now facing -- in aces. But don't be complacent.
Western nation-state governments are becoming inappropriate, too. There's
no immediate crisis, of course, but, little by little over the last few
decades, the public is losing faith in the bureaucrats and politicians who
are supposed to be serving them efficiently and honestly. They're counting
for less and less, particularly among the young. Our present forms of
government are numbered and will have to change drastically at some stage
-- or be swept away by social protest.
Keith
________________________________________________________________________
Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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