[ExI] Socialism and Environmentalism are inevitable

Omar Rahman rahmans at me.com
Tue May 27 00:42:40 UTC 2014



> 
> Date: Mon, 26 May 2014 13:48:25 -0700
> From: Tara Maya <tara at taramayastales.com>
> To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> Subject: Re: [ExI] Socialism and Environmentalism are inevitable
> Message-ID: <38FA18F2-8B8F-4CCB-9DAF-7C5904B32A58 at taramayastales.com>
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> 
>> 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. 

What was the name of this political entity? The ISSR, the Indian Soviet Socialist Republic? Sorry, you're just plain wrong about India being a communist or socialist country. Private property, banks, democracy, etc. these are hardly the hallmarks of a communist or extremely socialist country.

Perhaps you are aware of the history of India prior to independence? That's when the East India Company used private armies and and British troops to establish monopolies in things like making salt and weaving fabric. Perhaps you might remember that, among the many brave things he did, Gandhi made his own salt and wove his own fabric. This was illegal as a result of laws forced through by the British and the East India Company.

Imagine for a moment how powerful a monopoly that is. Without salt you cannot live. We earn a salary, called that because Roman legionnaires were paid in salt. Salt is important.

The East India Company had another hot product, opium. Ever heard of the Opium Wars? Another fine example of the depths capitalism can lead us to.

Post independence India was a largely preindustrial country generally controlled by feudal families. Transitioning from all the preexisting monopolies to a more open market in some sort of free for all wouldn't have been well advised after the chaos of independence and partition. Millions (more) would have died.

> 
> (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.)
> 

Perhaps the presence of a largely feudal ruling class in post independence India would convince you that it isn't a socialist country?  The most I could give you is that India has some some socialist policies, but that could be said about almost any government. I'm not sure what else I can say, I really don't think almost anyone would consider India a primarily socialist country.

> 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 interesting to note that Gandhi was murdered by Hindu Nationalists and that a very 'pro-business' Hindu Nationalist has just been elected.

> 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.
> 

And are now yielding fruit as India emerges as an economic powerhouse. India's current development is not due to just the last few, or even ten, years. Please remember that pre-colonial India was the result of a capitalist wonderland. 'Foreign investment', companies that were in control, and enforced their monopolies with armies were precisely the reasons that India wanted independence. They had been fighting for it since the 1850s and the 'Indian Mutiny'. 

> 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.

If, as you state and I agree, that government was corrupted by being in bed with business, it seems quite obvious that 'business' is a corrupting influence. 

> 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 g!
> overnment 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.

I will pause here just to marvel at what you have written.

> 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.
> 

There have been early adopters of technology for a very long time. Usually the military of states based on every type of political system.

> 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. 
> 

There are more laws about medical advances expressly at the behest of the big pharmaceutical companies so as to create a barrier to entry for small competitors. Also, why would a company ever lower the price of a patented cure for cancer? Companies can face lawsuits for not maximizing profits.

This is turning into a digression about India which however points out very clearly the defects of unfettered capitalism. Libertarians seem worried about governments, but there are many examples of capitalist companies which murder aboriginal people to get their land. Read a little about the East India Company before asserting that capitalism has the answers. The point you make about business corrupting government finds a fine example in the events leading up to and following the annexation of Hawaii. It reads like a horror story from the Libertarian perspective I think.


Regards,


Omar Rahman



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