I find that very hard to believe. Best-case scenario, a Tsarist or constitutional-republican Russia in 1939 might have been like Australia or Canada in 1939 – a nice place to live, much nicer than the USSR, but without the industrial resources to be any kind of military superpower. Hitler could’ve walked right over them without ever stopping to shake the gunk off his boots. (Assuming Hitler could come to power, in a world with no Bolshevik Revolution.)
The only people in America who ever had a Zeal for Democracy (as in politics) were madmen who brought the country to Civil War. Americans zealously loved their country, not their politics, and thank God for it. The French zealously loved their politics, and political systems, and it brought them to the Terror.
Democracy requires dispassion, humor, and sense. it can thrive best without zeal.
:dubious: I was talking about Andrew Jackson. And Thomas Jefferson. And their respective supporters/followers. Demo-zealots all. Don’t go blaming the Civil War on them! The Civil War was started by Southern aristos who were reluctant to let the common white man even vote!
Which does not go far to explain why there is absolutely no significant call whatsoever in Canada for those things to be privatized again.
What evidence have you that the government can run an airline better than private interests? Or sell gasoline?
Because most of them are dictatorships, and it makes it easier to steal the money. The one democracy, Ecuador, has seen its state-run oil company screw up massively.
There’s no such thing as collective human will. Decisions are carried out by small groups of people or sometimes even a single person.
The only economic laws to be discovered will rely on human nature. Anything else is arbitrary. Let’s say the studies that show creative workers do worse if you pay them more money is true. That means if a society’s leaders want more quality art then paying artists more money won’t work. Instead they’ll have to find others ways to encourage it, to foster more artistry in the society or attract them from abroad or whatever. Is that the sort of thing you mean?
I assume you don’t mean private power directing the government’s money hose to their pet causes or benefiting from their monopoly on legal violence as ‘economic forces being tamed to the collective will.’ Because that already happens just fine.
A decision by a small group of people is an instance of collective human will. And decisions are made by much larger groups. I hope nobody here is gonna start with some Randian “no such thing as a collective brain” bullshit. A good marriage is a collective brain.
So does this mean you’re fully responsible for the death of a million Iraqis, or just 1/300 millionth responsible?
Compare the population of Russia in 1939 with the population of Canada. I agree that a Tsarist Russia would have been worse, unless whoever took over from Nicholas II was economically progressive, which I doubt would have happened. But a reasonably capitalist society would have been much better. Look how badly Stalin screwed up agriculture, for instance. There might have been significant foreign investment also, since it was a big market. Under Communism, it was isolated.
And remember, a democratically elected leader might have listened to his generals warning about Hitler’s invasion - or may never have signed a nonaggression pact in the first place.
All true, I’m sure. But under no non-Bolshevik scenario does Russia so heavily industrialize by 1939. By 2011 is a different matter. Stalinism is something you use when you want to industrialize your country fast and damn the cost. Dirigisme works too, conditions permitting – it worked for Meiji Japan (which, as Paul Johnson pointed out in Modern Times, already had a substantial artisan class and a strong and ancient tradition of workshop discipline – which Russia lacked); but it’s still a form of state management of the economy.
Rather my point. Jefferson and Jackson loved this nation, but did not obsess over it. There is a difference. They had a vision but did not destroy the thing the loved in a mad dream to make it true. The south because mad because it became obsessed with its vision of democracy - a vision which indeed united men from all walks of life, high and low, far more than tidewater planters, and there are not few in the north I would condemn as well.
Really? I can easily see a scenario where the post-Tsarist Russia of 1920 industrializes as fast, and much more deeply, than the Russia of Lenin and Stalin.
Good lord, you’ve gone into random ranting. Decisions are never collective. Marriage is in way way a collective brain, but a man and women coming to compromise. As are all decisions.
:dubious: No “vision of democracy” played any part in that.
“I am an aristocrat! I love liberty, I hate equality.”
– John Randolph of Roanoke
Still no one?
Make accounting mandatory in the schools and teach kids that planned obsolescence is going on in cars and see how is affects how the collective human will reacts to economic forces.
http://www.bsu.edu/news/article/0,1370,-1019-11714,00.html
psik
I’m all for that, broader education is always an unmixed blessing, but I don’t see what economic problems it would solve.