[ExI] Socialism and Environmentalism are inevitable

[Tara Maya]

> I seem to have missed India's socialist or communist period. Is this the same India that has been fighting Maoist insurgents off and on for the past 50 or so years?

If you missed it, then you have not done even a cursory study of Indian history since independence. 

(As for your odd insinuation that opposing Maoists means you can't be socialist or even communist, I submit to you the USSR, which also opposed Maoists while communist. Dogmatists can always fall out amongst themselves.)

Gandhi wanted India to reject modern economics in ANY form. He wanted India to remain an agrarian society of villages. As much respect as I have for his pacifism, which I believe saved India from dictatorship, it is very good for his country that even his closest friends dismissed that absurd idea. Nehru and many others believed, like progressive Europeans (and indeed Americans) of the same period, in government-led development.

By remaining a democracy, a feat unrepeated in almost any other newly independent post-colonial nation, India avoided the terrible, terrible fate of, say, China, where the state-monopoly of the economy resulted in the death of thirty to seventy million people. That alone is a huge thing, and very much to India's credit.

At the same time, I dare say, that is what makes India such a damning example to socialism. They were a shining example of post-colonialism done right, done by leaders (at least the first generation) who were honorable and peaceful (yet not craven) and truly wanted to bring wealth to their people. They really did, and they really thought that protectionism, state-led industry, laws hemming in big business, discouraging foreign investment, and so on, would bring India in the First World within a generation. And it didn't. Their policies retarded India, and kept her a Third World nation for another three generations.

The Bhopal disaster, by the way, occurred before the real experimentation with loosening those controls began. India had a huge number of laws restricting business and 49% of Bhopal itself was essentially government-run. All of that wasn't enough to stop the corrupt individuals in that business from cutting corners. Indeed, how could it? The government was corrupted by being in bed with the business.  The thing I don't understand about those who process to suspect and hate the rich cat CEOs is why, why, why would you ALSO want to give them the power to hide behind the state. That is exactly what you do when you give business to be run by the government. You simply give the kinds of sociopaths who do seek power to have TWO ways to trick and rob people, one as a business leader and one as a government official. If you really distrust business, my god, make those f%#king wankers stand or fall on their own, not clothed in tax payer's money and behind the facade of impenetrable government bureaucracies.

Getting back to Gandhi, he said, correctly, I think, that poverty is the greatest violence. It claims more lives than gas leaks or oil spills, or even the atrocities of the Communist governments. That is what is so tragic about his abysmal economic sense. I agree with the personality test that indicated that many of the most companionate people in the world also tend to be socialists or welfare liberals, because they mistake compassion for good economics. But being compassionate doesn't mean you actually know how to create wealth. Unfortunately, people who tend to be good at business often also tend to be selfish jerkwads, sometimes even criminally selfish; and so we think that because those individuals are jerks, the system of free enterprise is fit only for jerks to exploit the innocent.

The amazing thing about capitalism is that it's the other way around. It's the only system where good people regularly exploit evil people; where the poor regularly exploit the rich. A good example of the later is technology. New technology starts out as clumsy, poorly designed, and extremely expensive. But stupid rich people will buy any gadget just to show off how rich they are. They pay the R&D costs of all that technology, until it becomes so cheap and so well-designed that even the poorest person can have a cell phone, television, automobile…. Imagine if you went to two people and you said to one, "I'm going to make you pay $1000 for a very bad piece of technology so that I can afford to tinker with it some more and sell a much better version to that other guy for $10." That would hardly seem fair. But the rich fall for it, and the poor benefit from it. In government run economies and most traditional economies, it's the other way around.

We would make much faster medical advances if we had less laws about it. One of the worst things you could ever do for the poor and sick of the world is tell a company that if it developed a cure for cancer, it must immediately make that cure cheap and available to all. The cure will never come. Almost as bad is to tell them, "You can only offer a cure when you're 100% sure it will work." The cure will be sloooow to come.  But tell them, "Sure, try out any bizarre new thing and charge whatever you like," the desperate sick rich people will pay for all sorts of crazy cures, most of which won't work. They will both pay for it and take all the risk. And ten years down the line, that cheap, available cure will arrive and cancer will go the way of small pox. 


Tara Maya
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On May 26, 2014, at 6:10 AM, Omar Rahman <rahmans at me.com> wrote:

> 
> Please tell the families living with the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster that their lives are better because of capitalism. Capitalism is the secret of putting more numbers in more ledgers, sometimes this spreads it all around, but generally it serves to concentrate it. Why? Precisely because of the capitalist's cherished principle of supply and demand. Those with excess cash are almost never in a situation of extreme demand thus eventually they will encounter an opportunity and have the resources to take advantage of it. Conversely the poor are almost always in a situation of 'demand' and must give over their resources to survive, and when they have an opportunity they almost never have the resources to take advantage of it. 'The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.' Some companies also achieve monopolies and place themselves in a situation of controlling supply to continuing demand. Transhumanists should be wary of the recent GSK / Novartis merger talks as I don't think any of us would like to be in the position of eternal serfdom for our supply of whatever potential longevity/cancer/Alzheimer's medicines become available. 
> 
> 
>> There are many examples. India, for instance, has done more for the poor with ten years of capitalism than with fifty of socialism. Small bank loans to the poor housewives have done more to shift wealth than huge donations to the governments of Third World governments.
> 
> I seem to have missed India's socialist or communist period. Is this the same India that has been fighting Maoist insurgents off and on for the past 50 or so years?
> 
> 

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