From: lee@wang.com (Lee Story)
Subject: Re: Where Have All the Liberals Gone? / Out to Pasture Everyone
Organization: Wang Laboratories, Inc.
Distribution: na
Date: 6 Apr 92 16:32:45
	<29D9EABB.25493@orion.oac.uci.edu>

(Carl Edman) writes:

   Lee Story writes
   >					  And I
   > must point out [...] that Taiwan, South Korea, or Hong
   > Kong were [NOT] the targets of wars (and "intelligence
   > service" infiltration) that undermined their
   > economies and destabilized their political systems, at
   > least since the '50s.

   Do you really mean that ? If so, you'd actually be making my
   point stronger. But I do suspect that you actually mean
   the opposite.

Oooof!  I saw the missing "NOT" (like the blind man seeing the hole in
the wall) just after the post went out.  Sorry.

   As a matter of fact cambodia was the site of one
   of the great socialist experiments in equality in this
   century, but almost two thirds of the population
   survived. [...]

Very cute!  I'm hardly a Marxist, but (1) it seems highly un-socialist
to drive the "proletariat" out of the cities and into farm labor; (2)
it seems likely that the prime motivation was not socialistic
levelling of economic status, but rather that there was no other
alternative to limit mass-starvation after the agricultural and
distribution systems had been destroyed (though I have no idea how
accurate the varying estimates of three weeks to six months' rice in
Phnom Penh were); (3) some estimates have been far short of 1/3 dead,
and most of those deaths may have been inevitable without massive aid
from the developed world to a people unwilling to become a client of
America no matter how much they hated the Khmer Rouge.  This is not an
apology for Pol Pot; it's just not a great case study of the effects
of "socialism" (and certainly not the "socialism" Russell had in
mind).

However, all in all I don't disagree with Carl's conclusions---just his
use of statistics.

   > [...] If truly
   > multinational corporations, with little concern for
   > anything other than their profits, are allowed to exist,
   > don't we need corresponding super-national laws,
   > courts, and regulation?  To wit, an effective world
   > government?  Despite certain libertarian leanings, I
   > think we do.  As did Bertrand Russell and many others. 
   > Perhaps the United Nations can evolve into it, as long as
   > the political world doesn't repolarize into another
   > stupid "superpower" us-vs-them dichotomy. 

   With all due respect for Bertrand Russell (which after
   reading a large number of his writings on many subject
   honestly do have), Mr Russell was a self-admitted
   socialist - an ideology which has brought more ruin to
   this century than any other to any other century since the
   days of the early christians. As such I have always taken
   his political views cum grano salis.  

Does this have anything to do with Russell's socialist leanings?
Only in the sense that he would probably have disapproved of an
anarchy of corporations as much as of an anarchy of individuals.

   The United Nations consists mostly out of small, poor
   states who every few years (like many bad debtors) change
   their names and move somewhere else with heads of states
   who actually are capable of excoriating vile western
   capitalists for lending them money yesterday and
   expecting repayment today and in the same breadth to
   demand more loans. In short - not necessarily the kind of
   people whom I would entrust running the worlds economy
   to. 

I'm not sure there's a good solution to the problem of rapacious,
above-any-law multinationals (or should one say subject to the weakest
law they can find---witness Liberian- and Panamanian-flagged
shipping), but it seems that without world government any proposal
will be temporary patchwork.  Sure, a composite government based on
something like the UN would be unfair and incompetent; my only claim
is that we should start, as I said, evolving toward world government,
which in my view means truly binding diplomacy (what the Congress,
Executive, and Courts do in the USA) which cannot be breached by
military force without the intervention of other governmental bodies,
local and "con-federal" (I run out of words here), to roll the force
back.  In American terms, sort of a new worldwide Federalism, where
any war would be treated as a civil war/disturbance.  And the major
powers (not those penny-ante debtors Carl is concerned with, but the
_really_big_ ones like the ol' USA) seem to be moving (inching,
creeping) toward such a scheme under UN aegis.  And if that puts Bush
and Major in the socialist camp, so be it.  I don't attach much
importance to labels.  Viewed from a sixteenth-century monarchist
perspective, Marx and Friedman have more commonality than difference;
I suspect that will be true from a twenty-fourth century one, if we
can get there.

Of course we must somehow include the Chinese without allowing them
the local right of totalitarianism (total suppression of conflicting
opinion) and mass-murder, and I don't know how to do that, either.
It's one thing to defeat and bail out Germany, Japan, or ever the
USSR; quite another to make two billion people starve in the name of
the new world order.  Anyone with a good answer will get my vote.
--

------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Lee Story (lee@wang.com) Wang Laboratories, Inc.
     (Boston and New Hampshire AMC, and Merrimack Valley Paddlers)
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Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory