A rigid ideology, a rampant, stifling, soulless bureaucracy, combined with a refusal to distinguish between what works and what does not – is a recipe for economic and social disaster.
by Daniel Greenfield
Take a tour of North Korea or the former Soviet Union and you will encounter massive structures and tremendous projects, epic in scope which are nevertheless complete failures. North Korea has been building a 105 story hotel since 1987. Even if it ever gets finished, there aren’t any people to stay in it. China and the USSR specialized in massive and massively disastrous dam construction projects. The Banqiao Dam failure alone killed almost 200,000 people. That’s more than every natural disaster in American history combined.
The Soviet Union used wheat as one of its national symbols, but despite being a vast agricultural empire, had gone billions into debt to buy Western wheat. Even as the Warsaw Pact nations were talking about destroying capitalism—by 1986 they had racked up 138 billion dollars in debt to Western banks to pay for basic subsistence level imported goods.
What went wrong? There was one easy clue. Altogether Soviet farmers used less than 5 percent of the land for private farming, they produced a third of the agricultural produce. Meanwhile the massive system of collectivization at the heart of Communism couldn’t even feed its own people. But all the while agricultural officials went on reporting record harvests each year.
The system was completely broken but only the people at the bottom had any inkling why. And there was no way for them to communicate that up the chain of command. Even if they had been able to, their only reward would have been a jail sentence. Those at the top could not concede that the system was broken, let alone why. Instead they put the country deeper into debt to pay for the consequences of their disastrous economic program.
This is not just history. It’s the present. It’s us.
A repressive bureaucracy, an out-of-touch political class, mounting debt, failing industries and an angry populace caught between government benefits and enforced poverty
Think about a country with a 15 trillion dollar debt whose leaders and media insist that everything is going swimmingly. A government which goes into debt for grandiose projects every year—and none of them ever amount to anything. A new year and a new trillion dollar budget, packed full of projects that are dead ends. Grand ideas that make the politicians feel good about themselves, but can never work. We beat the Soviet Union—but these days we look a lot like it. A repressive bureaucracy, an out-of-touch political class, mounting debt, failing industries and an angry populace caught between government benefits and enforced poverty.
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We have gone from a pragmatic goal-oriented society to a political society governed by ideology
What changed is our society. We have gone from a pragmatic goal-oriented society to a political society governed by ideology. The emphasis has shifted from the results, to how you get them. 90 percent of the effort is directed at the methodology and 10 percent at actually getting it done. Everything is politicized and nothing is accomplished. A project used to begin with a vision and end with a structure. Today it begins with diversity and ends with a bailout.
We’re losing our competence, the same way that the Russians lost theirs. The same way that people living under every ideological tyranny does.
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Policy detached from reality is guaranteed failure
Policy detached from reality is guaranteed failure. Ideological policies are certain to fail in the long run, and ideological tyrannies insulate themselves from knowledge of those failures. Measuring all success or failure only in light of compliance with the tenets of the ideology makes corrections very hard to apply. How do you fix a problem with broken tools? You can’t. Politicization creates a broken methodology. Ideological methods used to fix problems create more problems—because the real problem is the ideology.
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As the society’s morals and codes break down—the human wolves come out to feed
As the society’s morals and codes break down—the human wolves come out to feed. Revolutions are begun by idealists, but completed by tyrants. Brutality and ruthlessness in the name of an ideal are delegated to those who practice it for its own sake. As the Russian Revolution paved the way for Stalin—the chaotic mix of idealism and brutality practiced by liberal elites may open the door for our own monster. The man of vicious cunning that desperate liberals will turn to save their failing system in their darkest hour. The wolf among the fold whose brutality they will mistake for competence, and whose disdain for the individual will be taken for the mark of the true believer. That dark hour has not yet come, but if American liberals are faced with the prospect of absolute failure in the face of economic collapse—there is no telling who may rise in such a desperate moment. Liberals elevated Obama to stop the War on Terror. Whom they would elevate if Wisconsin goes national can only be imagined.
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Read the rest here: What we can learn from the Soviet Union
Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish
