Tag: Communism

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folly general freedom ideological culture too much government

Discreditable Credit

China Credit System, Sesame, China, Credit Rating, Common Sense

Capitalism can be rigged a hundred different ways, apparently. China’s is run by its Communist Party, and even current innovations bear the stamp of the Party.

Take “social credit.”

Not the quaint decentralist economic reform movement that was a minor deal in politics on the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada 60 or more years ago.

What I’m referring to is the innovative credit scoring system devised by a gaming company in cooperation with China’s commie-​run government.

But it’s not quite like the credit scoring systems set up by competing companies in the U.S., which cook up “credit scores” based on going into debt and paying off debt. If you pay your bills, you get a higher score. If you don’t, it plummets.

The new “Sesame” credit scoring system is less interested in the debts you pay off and more in what you buy and what you put up on social media. The company has concocted a secret algorithm, and gives higher scores to good citizens — obedient people — and lower scores to lazy people (inferred from, say, if you play a lot of video games) or to folks who are rebellious free thinkers (posting pictures of Tank Man in Tiananmen Square, for example).

That is what it seems like, so far.

It rewards those Chinese who are industrious (yay?) and who kowtow to Communist Party expectations (yikes!) — and makes me extra glad I live in the U.S., where government is too chaotic and stupid to cook up anything quite this insidious.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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China Credit System, Sesame, China, Credit Rating, Common Sense

 

Categories
general freedom nannyism privacy

One, Two or Free?

one child policy, china, family planning, communist, five year plan

The vast majority of Chinese people are celebrating. Last week, the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party decreed that it will cease enforcing the one-​child-​only policy this coming March — after 35 years — as part of its 13th Five Year Plan.

Just speaking for myself, infanticide, coerced abortions and forced sterilizations seem … well, not good. Bad, even. Really bad. Or more precisely, evil, tyrannical and totalitarian … you know, if we want to use such “extreme” language.

But not everyone sees it my way.

Back in 1990, Molly Yard claimed that “[t]he Chinese government doesn’t coerce people.” Why, according to this former head of the National Organization of Women, “the only responsible policy [China] can have is to control family planning.” She went all the way: “I consider the Chinese government’s policy among the most intelligent in the world.”

The Los Angeles Times reported in 2012 that China’s “population control efforts have helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and contributed to China’s spectacular economic growth.”

That has not only been disputed — many economists point to policy changes that allowed entrepreneurship and private property — but overturned by reality. The one-​child policy has been a disaster. There are now 117 young men for every 100 young women in China, and an aging population without enough youngsters to provide for them.

Alas, the one child policy is not being replaced with reproductive freedom. The government will still limit couples to two kids. That’s better than one, sure. But I have three children. If I were Chinese, I wouldn’t want to give up one of them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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one child policy, china, family planning, communist, five year plan

 

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general freedom ideological culture

Don’t Empower Venezuelan Government

If you run a company that buys oil from Venezuela, stop.

If you purchase fuel from a company getting its product from Venezuela, stop.

If you run a government that imposes lots of arbitrary restrictions on the exploration, development, and/​or transport of oil, stop that also. 

But don’t wait for the last to happen if you can do the first. Or second.

And the second means: Don’t buy gas from Citgo.Leopoldo López

We have long had more than sufficient cause to refrain from financially empowering Venezuela’s autocratic regime, and to make it a lot easier for domestic buyers and sellers to shun dealings with dictators who happen to be sitting on a lot of oil. These reasons didn’t fade after the death last year of Hugo Chavez.

News from the communist country underscores the viciousness of the Venezuelan tyranny. Organizations like the Human Rights Foundation have called attention to the plight of all those detained and abused for peacefully protesting the regime by formally declaring opposition leader Leopoldo López, detained since February, to be a prisoner of conscience of the Maduro government; and by vocally condemning the government’s torture of student protestors Marco Aurelio Coello and Christian Holdack, also detained since February.

Communist governments steal everyone’s stuff; that is the pain that everybody who works for a living sees and feels. They also tend to resort to repression and torture of any who dare object to their repressive policies. Persons free to boycott such tyranny should boycott it. Now. In order to do so, we need not wait for a government or even have the support of our own government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense

Memes to Shun

Wasn’t Rolling Stone once a clever and trendy magazine? Now it’s descended into history’s dustbin to publish a listicle showing just how low it can go. Jesse Myerson’s “Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For” scrapes the bottom of the memetic barrel, almost all the way down to Communism.

  1. Public Works über alles. Can’t find a job? Work for the government, thus fulfilling the notion of “Guaranteed work for everybody … who wants to” sit around and look busy.
  2. Guarantee an income, or “Social Security for All.” Hoary. But the higher that guaranteed level is, the more it would nullify the make-​work schemes of proposal no. 1, above. That’s only the most obvious problem.
  3. Seize the land. Yup, land communism. How 19th century. Because landlords, we’re informed, “don’t really do anything to earn their money.” For some reason, the author of this ignorant list of proposals doesn’t mention the most obvious problem with this old tradition: the tragedy of the commons. If mass poverty won’t convince you, what about environmental degradation?
  4. State Socialism, pure and simple, advertised as “Make Everything Owned by Everybody.” Yes, a major American magazine has now endorsed the very system that was tried by the worst totalitarian regimes in the modern world, the Soviet Union, Communist China, etc. No mention of Ludwig von Mises’ explanation as to why this cannot work.

At least Myerson’s fifth “reform” isn’t to eradicate money. It’s to

  1. Set up state banks.

Not as goofy as the other ideas, but hey: in a world where the government owns all the land and all the capital, and people don’t have to work — but can earn extra bucks in government “jobs” — what, exactly, will his beloved state banks be loaning us to accomplish?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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term limits

Term Limits for Cuba?

You can’t cheer some victories — they just don’t seem real.

I mean, what can you make of the “victory” for term limits represented by Raul Castro’s endorsement of the reform during an endless speech at his country’s Sixth Communist Party Congress? 

Castro told fellow commies that political officials, including El Presidente, should be limited to two consecutive five-​year terms. Seems that with the Castro brothers about to shuffle off this mortal coil, decades of dictatorship have shrunk the pool of well-​tested vicious ranters experienced maligning capitalist running dogs and running the country into the ground.

The dear leader’s speech touted a laundry list of proposed changes to Cuba’s socialist system, including legalizing the sale of cars and homes, a possibility the party has been “studying.” Some of these reforms might take effect and make life a little easier for Cubans.

Perhaps Raul Castro, 79, reflecting on his ailing fratello’s disastrous half-​century dictatorship (1959 to 2008, more or less), has decided Cuba’s socialism and autocracy don’t really work after all.

It’s happened in other moribund societies.

But even if presidential term limits should (against all odds) be enacted before Raul kicks the bucket, they won’t mean much if his successor decides they don’t mean much. And like other critics of the regime, I doubt that Cuba will be the country to buck the trend of governments “restricted” by term limits that are not worth the tissue-​paper constitutions they’re written on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Fidel Fesses Up

Cuba’s 1959 revolution happened before I was born. Fidel Castro won, and ruled the country with an iron fist and steel jaw until a few years ago, when he handed power over to his brother, Raul.

The country’s been Communist, governed on allegedly Marxist principles, with the Castros sticking by their faith in total government even after the Soviet Union collapsed. Their dogged dedication to state socialism is impressive, in its way.

It’s like, say, watching Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter character on the silver screen. You cannot approve of motive or act, but the sheer fortitude! The evil genius!

A journalist for The Atlantic recently asked the retired Fidel Castro whether he still thought Cuba’s communism was exportable. And the old man replied, “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.”

The journalist’s companion, a Latin American scholar, interpreted this huge admission as recognition that Cuba has too much government.

Should we take a camera, a megaphone and a boat to Michael Moore’s moat and ask him how he feels about this?

The Cuban government provides its citizens with free education, medical care, and transportation. And not much else. Except state harassment and arrest for speaking out. And the rationing of food is pretty stingy. Nearly everybody works for the government nexus.

But hey, many well-​educated folks in America have admired the government. Why? For all those big state projects. Health! Education! Buses!

Big whoop, when you’re hungry and a slave to the state.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.