|
Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action. |
On March 31 2017 06:27 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2017 06:08 Plansix wrote:On March 31 2017 06:02 Paljas wrote:
when legallord is actutally the most reasonable poster for more than one page of discussion, you know that the thread is doing bad.
He is only moments away from saying "Look Stalin wasn't that bad. He got a lot of things right." He did. His measures were cruel and barbaric and I would never want those costs to justify the outcome, but as Friedman said, you can't put an infinite value on life. You want extraordinary industrial growth and independence starting with a shitty economy? You gotta make some sacrifices. You want to do that before, during and after war times when you are the last bastion against Hitler, well shit's gonna pile up. Given that the alternative would have probably been a Blitzkrieg defeat in WW2, Stalin may as well have saved the world from Hitler. But as "another cruel" leader put it: We have slaughtered the wrong pig!
After a lot of planned economy experiences we now know it simply does not stack up in providing economic welfare and human develop to societies as market economies can. There is just no merit to the Idea that there were positive aspects top the Soviet economic policy - it never served it's citizens nor did it create anything resembling institutions that could guarantee it sustained economic growth.
I mean, if only we had am example of a large country that tried a planned economy with die results and then transitioned to a market economy with unbelievably positive results.... (China, I'm taking about China....).
Legallord do you know where to find statistics on car ownership rates in the Soviet Union?
|
On March 31 2017 06:41 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2017 06:27 Big J wrote:On March 31 2017 06:08 Plansix wrote:On March 31 2017 06:02 Paljas wrote:
when legallord is actutally the most reasonable poster for more than one page of discussion, you know that the thread is doing bad.
He is only moments away from saying "Look Stalin wasn't that bad. He got a lot of things right." He did. His measures were cruel and barbaric and I would never want those costs to justify the outcome, but as Friedman said, you can't put an infinite value on life. You want extraordinary industrial growth and independence starting with a shitty economy? You gotta make some sacrifices. You want to do that before, during and after war times when you are the last bastion against Hitler, well shit's gonna pile up. Given that the alternative would have probably been a Blitzkrieg defeat in WW2, Stalin may as well have saved the world from Hitler. But as "another cruel" leader put it: We have slaughtered the wrong pig! You are not wrong that he saved likely saved the Russia from Nazi Germany and brought Russia into the modern era kicking and screaming. No historian will argue against that, because it is true. But that assessment is through the detached view of the historian who is attempting understand the era and how it impacted the era’s that followed. It is not through an attempt to apply Stalin or other dictators to the modern era, or champion them as great leaders that we should follow. And this is a politics thread, not a history thread. When someone says "Stalin wasn't all bad", that context matters a lot.
Let me be very clear about my view, Stalin was a product of global, anti-communist policy. The West in all of its forms, capitalist and former fascist should take a good amount of self-blame for the rise of authoritarianism and a militarist communism in the East. It was Germany in WW1 who used the pacifist Lenin to beat Russia. It was the West that financed and led the civil war against Lenin and Trotzki causing millions of deaths and an even worse economical situation in Russia, it was anti-communist fanatism fostered by the West that caused Hitler to invade the USSR and last but not least Churchill's anti-communist fanatism that caused the East-West divide after WW2. You don't have to wonder, that a communist-fanatic like Stalin would do whatever it takes to put the Soviet Union on a level with the West in terms of military, hegemonial power and industrialization.
More than anything else, the example of Lenin's turn to Terror and Stalin's ruthless policy shows us, that if you have any model that is not perceived well by the elites of the ruling Empire(s) of the world, you are prepared to take them on in and outside of your country in a war or you are going to be taken down by them. Whether or not the system you are proposing is good, liberal, just or none of that, if we know anything from history, than that in particular the US (still) does not give a damn about the sovereignty of other countries to defend and acquire the sources of their wealth. (with hypocrit Europe sitting around yelling: "oh noes, don't do that again. We really don't need cheaper resources, it just happens that we are going to buy them after the US has forced their industries into other countries.")
And it is not a coincidence, that populism in the West nowadays goes hand in hand with Anti-American and pro-Russian sentiments. A vast majority of the populist voter base have lived through the end of the cold war. They have actively seen Russia torn to pieces from the outside and the inside while the USA and NATO have led one unjustifiable war after the other.
On March 31 2017 07:09 warding wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2017 06:27 Big J wrote:On March 31 2017 06:08 Plansix wrote:On March 31 2017 06:02 Paljas wrote:
when legallord is actutally the most reasonable poster for more than one page of discussion, you know that the thread is doing bad.
He is only moments away from saying "Look Stalin wasn't that bad. He got a lot of things right." He did. His measures were cruel and barbaric and I would never want those costs to justify the outcome, but as Friedman said, you can't put an infinite value on life. You want extraordinary industrial growth and independence starting with a shitty economy? You gotta make some sacrifices. You want to do that before, during and after war times when you are the last bastion against Hitler, well shit's gonna pile up. Given that the alternative would have probably been a Blitzkrieg defeat in WW2, Stalin may as well have saved the world from Hitler. But as "another cruel" leader put it: We have slaughtered the wrong pig! After a lot of planned economy experiences we now know it simply does not stack up in providing economic welfare and human develop to societies as market economies can. There is just no merit to the Idea that there were positive aspects top the Soviet economic policy - it never served it's citizens nor did it create anything resembling institutions that could guarantee it sustained economic growth. I mean, if only we had am example of a large country that tried a planned economy with die results and then transitioned to a market economy with unbelievably positive results.... (China, I'm taking about China....). Legallord do you know where to find statistics on car ownership rates in the Soviet Union?
I am absolutely not a fan of a planned economy for reasons of innovation, liberty, democracy and utilitarianism. Also I do not believe, that a planned economy is necessary (and obviously not benefitial in the longrun) for a socialist system. But Stalin was very successful in terms of economic growth, that's just an historical fact. How successful we may never know, but I haven't seen any historical, economical scientific evidence that denies that.
Edit: @zatic: Sorry, I went full respond mode and didn't read your comment. I'll behave.
|
It is true that a dictator can do amazing things for a country if they are willing to kill 10 million or more of their own people to get there. It will be debated into the end of time if that is a sign of a strong leader or simply one that is willing to kill anyone who opposes them. And if there is any difference between those two things.
|
Got a feeling that some of the posters here values country more then their own life or any life at all. You can't justify even a single death in causes of any country, it this case the only exception with human sacrificing would be Bruce Willis/Asteroid type of event.
So it's pretty barbaric to say person/country X did a great job beating person/country Y by sacrificing 10 million (put any number above 0). Dictators in fact has no face they are the same threat to a humanity.
|
On March 31 2017 08:55 cSc.Dav1oN wrote:
Got a feeling that some of the posters here values country more then their own life or any life at all. You can't justify even a single death in causes of any country, it this case the only exception with human sacrificing would be Bruce Willis/Asteroid type of event.
So it's pretty barbaric to say person X did a great job beating person Y by sacrificing 10 million (put any number above 0). Discators in fact has no face they are the same threat to a humanity.
If you are talking about me, I don't care for countries a lot. They are completely artificial. They can be used for different purposes, usually to protect people on the inside from societies on the outside, but also to keep people in order, for better and worse.
But there is an economic reality. You don't want to make a trade off between lives and money, hence putting an infinite value on life? Then how come that in Western societies people die of medical issues, because they can't afford treatment?
Well, the reason why we don't see this as "us killing them" is that we call it liberalism and it was "their free choice" to not get the proper insurance. On the other hand, when you have authoritarianism and someone starves, we say "that's the state's fault; the state should have planned better and created more food instead of heavy industry. Stalin killed that guy."
The reality is that it really doesn't matter whether you are one of millions of dead people in india that starved because of Churchill not giving a damn about intervening in favor of those brown guys, or whether you died because Stalin put the heavy industry first. The question we should ask ourselves is what system is best to provide and distribute goods in an economically and ecologically sustainable way, which empowers the individual in his needs and protects him in his needs from others. Peaceful, democratic, liberal and egalitarian market systems seem to work best by far.
|
we don't usually have people dying because of a direct lack of healthcare in most of Europe at least. Of course there are cases of neglect and institutional failure, but you generally have a right and access to healthcare in pretty much all countries independent of your income. And most of Europe got to that point without any form of dictatorship. In fact we burned the continent down twice because of it and had to rebuild again. Still worked out. Many smaller countries in the post-war era have avoided that fate too.
Authoritarianism really isn't some necessary evil that every country needs to go through and nobody but the authoritarian countries ought to take the blame for it.
|
On March 31 2017 10:27 Nyxisto wrote:
we don't usually have people dying because of a direct lack of healthcare in most of Europe at least. Of course there are cases of neglect and institutional failure, but you generally have a right and access to healthcare in pretty much all countries independent of your income. And most of Europe got to that point without any form of dictatorship. In fact we burned the continent down twice because of it and had to rebuild again. Still worked out. Many smaller countries in the post-war era have avoided that fate too.
Authoritarianism really isn't some necessary evil that every country needs to go through and nobody but the authoritarian countries ought to take the blame for it.
You kinda missed Big J's point due to focusing on the specific example given I think? His overall point is fairly uncontroversial as far as I can tell: Whenever you make a budget you have to make decisions, these decisions have consequences (death/discomfort/sickness/environmental damage) and thus you have to decide "what is a life worth?". We could always spend more money on healthcare (hypothetical: a new cancer-drug which prolongs survival with 3 months priced at 3 million euro per year per patient), yet we chose to build roads, fund schools, have a military - you name it - instead.
Further, I think you are actually being incredibly simplistic if you want to simply write EUs development off as "we got there without any for of dictatorship". That might be arguably true (depending on where you define start of development), but there were some extenuating circumstances (including burning down the continent twice which was likely a positive from a pure development POV) which are impossible for other countries to recreate.
|
Furthermore a lot of countries in EU actually had some sort of dictatorship after WWII.
Portugal, Spain, Greece, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and (Estonia, Lithuania, Latavia as part of Soviet Union).
|
Listening to LegalLord rewriting history for his own purposes makes me appreciate how the Jews feel about holocaust deniers.
|
On March 31 2017 09:32 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2017 08:55 cSc.Dav1oN wrote:
Got a feeling that some of the posters here values country more then their own life or any life at all. You can't justify even a single death in causes of any country, it this case the only exception with human sacrificing would be Bruce Willis/Asteroid type of event.
So it's pretty barbaric to say person X did a great job beating person Y by sacrificing 10 million (put any number above 0). Discators in fact has no face they are the same threat to a humanity. If you are talking about me, I don't care for countries a lot. They are completely artificial. They can be used for different purposes, usually to protect people on the inside from societies on the outside, but also to keep people in order, for better and worse. But there is an economic reality. You don't want to make a trade off between lives and money, hence putting an infinite value on life? Then how come that in Western societies people die of medical issues, because they can't afford treatment? Well, the reason why we don't see this as "us killing them" is that we call it liberalism and it was "their free choice" to not get the proper insurance. On the other hand, when you have authoritarianism and someone starves, we say "that's the state's fault; the state should have planned better and created more food instead of heavy industry. Stalin killed that guy." The reality is that it really doesn't matter whether you are one of millions of dead people in india that starved because of Churchill not giving a damn about intervening in favor of those brown guys, or whether you died because Stalin put the heavy industry first. The question we should ask ourselves is what system is best to provide and distribute goods in an economically and ecologically sustainable way, which empowers the individual in his needs and protects him in his needs from others. Peaceful, democratic, liberal and egalitarian market systems seem to work best by far.
The comparison between healthcare and economic growth isn't a good one. In healthcare there's a finite amount of care we can give even if we put all our available resources into it. So there has to be a trade off between the amount of care given and the life of a person. Economic growth on the other hand requires no such trade-off. There are countries which developed without any such sacrifice (Asian tigers). Millions of people dying only makes it harder to industrialize since you're destroying an immense amount of human capital.
Stalin's economic development was never sustainable either way. He never built up the institutions to foster long term economic growth. Something all developed countries have in common (whether they're a one party state or a democracy) is that they have strong institutions. So while he might've grown the economy at the start he never laid the stable fundamentals required for growth spanning over decades.
|
On March 31 2017 16:59 opisska wrote:
Listening to LegalLord rewriting history for his own purposes makes me appreciate how the Jews feel about holocaust deniers.
Didn't sound to me like there were any major distortions in what he wrote to an extent comparable to Holocaust denial.
There are lots of people who survived the USSR and think it wasn't all so bad. What do we do with those people? Call them liars and morons and write off their opinions entirely? Or acknowledge perhaps that the USSR did in fact make some people happy, at least relative to the capitalism that followed?
|
USSR perfromed numerous atrocities both on its own population and on nations under their control. Holodomor alone has more victims than Holocaust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Is the fact that some people were happy in USSR somehow offsets that? Newsflash some people were happy in Nazi germany, that makes Hitler ok guy?
|
On March 31 2017 19:53 RvB wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2017 09:32 Big J wrote:On March 31 2017 08:55 cSc.Dav1oN wrote:
Got a feeling that some of the posters here values country more then their own life or any life at all. You can't justify even a single death in causes of any country, it this case the only exception with human sacrificing would be Bruce Willis/Asteroid type of event.
So it's pretty barbaric to say person X did a great job beating person Y by sacrificing 10 million (put any number above 0). Discators in fact has no face they are the same threat to a humanity. If you are talking about me, I don't care for countries a lot. They are completely artificial. They can be used for different purposes, usually to protect people on the inside from societies on the outside, but also to keep people in order, for better and worse. But there is an economic reality. You don't want to make a trade off between lives and money, hence putting an infinite value on life? Then how come that in Western societies people die of medical issues, because they can't afford treatment? Well, the reason why we don't see this as "us killing them" is that we call it liberalism and it was "their free choice" to not get the proper insurance. On the other hand, when you have authoritarianism and someone starves, we say "that's the state's fault; the state should have planned better and created more food instead of heavy industry. Stalin killed that guy." The reality is that it really doesn't matter whether you are one of millions of dead people in india that starved because of Churchill not giving a damn about intervening in favor of those brown guys, or whether you died because Stalin put the heavy industry first. The question we should ask ourselves is what system is best to provide and distribute goods in an economically and ecologically sustainable way, which empowers the individual in his needs and protects him in his needs from others. Peaceful, democratic, liberal and egalitarian market systems seem to work best by far. The comparison between healthcare and economic growth isn't a good one. In healthcare there's a finite amount of care we can give even if we put all our available resources into it. So there has to be a trade off between the amount of care given and the life of a person. Economic growth on the other hand requires no such trade-off.
It depends where you are in your economic development. If you build a factory the build-up is growth and a new factory is damn efficient at producing more growth in the longrun, while if you use your inputs to produce food instead, the food will be gone one way or another by the end of the year and the only growth gain you get is a better understanding of what you actually produce and a tiny bit of innovation through the production process. Stalin chose industry over food, which led to amazing growth rates and starvation. There is no huge secret behind Stalin's industrialization and why it worked so well, what he did was plainly putting all the obvious inputs in the country to work and using them to create more obvious inputs like roads, railways, factories and schools. He chose future production over fullfilling the people's needs. The problem with that is that you can really only do it with all the basic stuff, because later on you will not get responses from your people what you actually want to aim for and how to make production more efficient. That's why the free market works so well, it manages this balance quite well. It maybe worse at growing the obvious things for which you need a longterm planning big player, like roads or creating actual full employment of the people in the proper age, but it is really good at getting a response from those who can afford consumption to know in which area to improve. (which is by the way the reason why lobbyism is kind of necessary for bigger firms, who behave like micro-states. They have the capital power to make huge investments that will pay off eventually, if they get other global players like states to guarantee them a monopoly for some time, for example through investment protection agreements that stifle democracy)
There are countries which developed without any such sacrifice (Asian tigers). Millions of people dying only makes it harder to industrialize since you're destroying an immense amount of human capital.
To put it quite brutally honest, usually it is quite the other way around. The weakest parts of society - the ones who are unproductive or quite under average - of a society die first in such a catastrophe, in particular the elderly. This leaves the rest with more of everything per capita afterwards while overall the decrease is not that much.
Stalin's economic development was never sustainable either way. He never built up the institutions to foster long term economic growth. Something all developed countries have in common (whether they're a one party state or a democracy) is that they have strong institutions. So while he might've grown the economy at the start he never laid the stable fundamentals required for growth spanning over decades.
I mean they had committees and planning offices, right? They weren't completely clueless what they wanted to produce next. So obviously, if you keep that system up and running, if you keep on defining your economic goals as a state, why wouldn't it be sustainable? Not with the same rate I guess, but if your state just wants to produce more weapons and keeps on growing that sector, you will get growth and more production. If the rich in our state want an overblown financial system we also call that growth. Is it sustainable? For as long as we don't let it collapse like we did by saving it in 2008, yes, we make it sustainable. But just like piling up weapons like the Soviet Union did, it is not the maximum added up utility function of the people overall, it only maximizes the utility function of each person based on their starting capital and skill.
|
Do you even know why the USSR and then the Eastern bloc fell in the first place? It was because the planned economy decayed to the point where it was no longer sustainable at all. The economy was not only drained by military expenditures, but it also continuously kept not meeting demand with supply due to the nature of central planning. Eventually it became completely dependent on oil exports; when the oli price fell in the late 80s, there was widespread shortage of everything across the country and that's what started the dissolution. Shortage of bread is the greatest revolutionary leader.
|
On March 31 2017 22:40 Silvanel wrote:USSR perfromed numerous atrocities both on its own population and on nations under their control. Holodomor alone has more victims than Holocaust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HolodomorIs the fact that some people were happy in USSR somehow offsets that? Newsflash some people were happy in Nazi germany, that makes Hitler ok guy?
It also helps that a lot of the people who survived those terrible events have now died of old age. Much like the Great Depression or McCarthyism, we are slowly losing firsthand accounts of these moments in history. Which makes them ripe to be re-written and reused. America First was the US Nazi party and it would have been unthinkable to use that phrase in politics in the late 20th century.
It’s a brave new era where we have the option to repeat all our mistakes from the last era.
|
On March 31 2017 22:40 Silvanel wrote:USSR perfromed numerous atrocities both on its own population and on nations under their control. Holodomor alone has more victims than Holocaust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HolodomorIs the fact that some people were happy in USSR somehow offsets that? Newsflash some people were happy in Nazi germany, that makes Hitler ok guy?
Nobody here is denying (at least from what I have seen) that the USSR is responsible for many atrocities, especially under Stalin.
The claim however is that towards the end of its lifespan, i.e. under Brezhnev and Gorbachev, the USSR was a total shithole in terms of quality-of-life. That is not the whole case. Certainly many people saw it that way, but also there were many who think life was better in the '70s and '80s. So again, are we to write off their opinions entirely because those people are ignorant or liars? Should we write off their opinions because of atrocities the USSR committed?
|
On March 31 2017 23:06 LightSpectra wrote:
but also there were many who think life was better in the '70s and '80s?
It was good because they were young. It's now bad because they are old.
|
Then why are today's youth comparatively more pessimistic?
|
On March 31 2017 23:06 LightSpectra wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2017 22:40 Silvanel wrote:USSR perfromed numerous atrocities both on its own population and on nations under their control. Holodomor alone has more victims than Holocaust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HolodomorIs the fact that some people were happy in USSR somehow offsets that? Newsflash some people were happy in Nazi germany, that makes Hitler ok guy? Nobody here is denying (at least from what I have seen) that the USSR is responsible for many atrocities, especially under Stalin. The claim however is that towards the end of its lifespan, i.e. under Brezhnev and Gorbachev, the USSR was a total shithole in terms of quality-of-life. That is not the whole case. Certainly many people saw it that way, but also there were many who think life was better in the '70s and '80s. So again, are we to write off their opinions entirely because those people are ignorant or liars? Should we write off their opinions because of atrocities the USSR committed?
Well then people can talk about those eras without referencing Stalin, who died in 1953 and had little to do with the state of the USSR in the 70s and 80s. We are not disregarding those opinions either. Of course there were people who loved the USSR. There always are.
|
On March 31 2017 23:19 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2017 23:06 LightSpectra wrote:On March 31 2017 22:40 Silvanel wrote:USSR perfromed numerous atrocities both on its own population and on nations under their control. Holodomor alone has more victims than Holocaust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HolodomorIs the fact that some people were happy in USSR somehow offsets that? Newsflash some people were happy in Nazi germany, that makes Hitler ok guy? Nobody here is denying (at least from what I have seen) that the USSR is responsible for many atrocities, especially under Stalin. The claim however is that towards the end of its lifespan, i.e. under Brezhnev and Gorbachev, the USSR was a total shithole in terms of quality-of-life. That is not the whole case. Certainly many people saw it that way, but also there were many who think life was better in the '70s and '80s. So again, are we to write off their opinions entirely because those people are ignorant or liars? Should we write off their opinions because of atrocities the USSR committed? Well then people can talk about those eras without referencing Stalin, who died in 1953 and had little to do with the state of the USSR in the 70s and 80s. We are not disregarding those opinions either. Of course there were people who loved the USSR. There always are.
The only reason anybody is talking about Stalin is because you tried to bait LL by saying "He is only moments away from saying "Look Stalin wasn't that bad. He got a lot of things right." "
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
