"Real Socialism" Has Indeed Been Tried — And It's Been a Disaster
"May 5th marks the 200th Anniversary of Karl Marx's birth, and in spite of inspiring a wide variety of political movements that have caused countless human rights disasters, Marx continues to be an object of admiration among many intellectuals and artists. "
..or one autographed picture of Sean Penn.
Change?
He should have trimmed your nose and ear hairs
That’s an expensive haircut.
Ahhhhh, a socialist paradise where the workers appriciate the value of money, and therefore use capitalist free trade of services and goods in order to live.
The problem is that pretty soon you have to barter to keep them from stealing from you.
Give a Venezuelan a fish, and you feed him for a day.
Give a Venezuelan an automatic rifle, and you let him eat the filthy Communists that are starving him.
I wonder what the Ladies of the Evening are accepting for pay these days.
¡Viva la Revolución!
Which is why few of these people should ever be entrusted with any position of power, and why the term 'intellectual' actually means 'ideologue' - not someone using their intellect.
Fiat currency was an astonishing revolution in finance. The first experiments went pretty badly. If I recall, the French introduced it first. Everything went well, but politicians and royalty kept wanting more money. Next thing you know, it was all worthless.
The gold standard kept inflation low. But in the sixties, LBJ wanted his war and his Great Society giveaway. He printed more money than we had gold to back it at the official rates. Charles de Gaulle realized this and started buying and exchanging dollars for gold. Nixon took us off the gold standard in ‘73 to prevent all the gold from flowing to France. After ‘73, the money supply growth graph looks like a hockey stick. We are heading the same way as the first French experiment, and, for the same reasons.
The man stared at the money with sullen indifference, not moving, not lifting a hand for it, still clutching the two buckets. If one were ever to see a man devoid of greed, thought Dagny, there he was.
"We don't need no money around here," he said.
"Don't you work for a living?"
"Yeah."
"Well, what do you use for money/"
The man put the buckets down, as if it had just occurred to him that he did not have to stand straining under their weight. "We don't use no money," he said. "We just trade things amongst us."
"How do you trade with people from other towns?"
"We don't go to no other towns."
-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Part I ("Non-Contradiction"), Chapter IX (The Sacred and the Profane), page 285
I wouldn’t pay more than four bananas and one egg.
Do you know how long it takes to earn an egg down there!
And folks are going bananas over the shortage...
At the end of the Soviet Union I recall the NYT reporting that the barter equivalent of a flight from Moscow to Vladivostok was 5 quarts of smuggled finish milk. Aeroflot prices were still at the government established price. So, central planning and anarchic chaos ultimately arrive at the same place.
These poor people must not have any guns.
I’d rather eat and cut my own hair.
The author of the article seems to be missing the point. There is no shortage of basic goods. There is only a shortage of the freedom to provide or obtain such goods.
In a barter economy, there is very little pressure for inflation.
In an economy with currency that is not convertible to gold, the government can print more and more bills and distribute them, leading the people to believe they actually have more money.
The government has a vested interest in causing prices to rise out of control. People in government are protected by cost-of-living raises. Those with savings are rendered instantly poor.