On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 8:12 PM, Michael Perelman <[email protected]> wrote: > I think that your reference to "disastrously"is overblown. The USSR made > incredible progress, overcoming the destruction of two world wars, and with > an economy undermined by Cold War threats and sabotage. The recent > capitalist development in both Russia and China would be impossible without > the infrastructure put in place under planning. > > The aggressive attitude of the United States also helped to reinforce the > inertia of the old Soviet Communist Party. >
Point taken - though I'd argue this is less true of Maoist China. Idiotic ideas like exterminating sparrows and backyard steel furnaces cannot possibly be blamed on hostile foreign nations, and I think "disaster" is not an overstatement of the Great Leap Forward. The key question is how do you protect society when a central planner makes a disastrous mistake? I believe this was Hayek's big argument against socialism (at least the central planned variety) and I have to say I have never seen a good rebuttal. -raghu. -- "I lost a button hole today" - Steven Wright _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
