Milton Friedman – Greed not in Communism?
A Communist with a Truthful Agenda
In large part because of an economic system completely at odds with human nature, communists have a nasty habit of never delivering on Marx’s vision.
They promise equality, but the elite enjoy lavish lifestyles while ordinary people suffer.- They promise better lives for workers, but they deliver deprivation and suffering.
- They promise harmony, but the reality of socialists societies is division and discord.
One obvious conclusion is that communists are despicable people That’s true, and the people who give aid and comfort to communists also deserve scorn.
Another conclusion is that we should disbelieve anything communists say.
Based on the above examples, that would be an understandable conclusion.
But I have found a communist who is semi-truthful. His name is Kohei Saito and I trust him because he is telling people that his policies will lead to less prosperity.
Here are some excerpts from a New York Timesstory by Ben Dooley and .
When Kohei Saito decided to write about “degrowth communism,” his editor was understandably skeptical. Communism is unpopular in Japan. …So a book arguing that Japan should view its current condition of population decline and economic stagnation not as a crisis, but as an opportunity for Marxist reinvention, sounded like a tough sell.
But…Mr. Saito’s book “Capital in the Anthropocene” has sold more than 500,000 copies, exceeding his wildest imaginings. Mr. Saito, a philosophy professor at the University of Tokyo, appears regularly in Japanese media to discuss his ideas. …Mr. Saito said, …“there are too many cars, too many skyscrapers, too many convenience stores, too much fast fashion,”… Mr. Saito is not clear exactly what shape a world under degrowth communism would take, but he insists that it would be…focused on expanding communal resources.
It is safe to say that Mr. Saito is an immoral idiot.
But I have to give him credit for accidental honesty. Communism is very capable of delivering “degrowth.”
If Japan follows Saito’s advice, it is a sure bet that there will be fewer cars, fewer skyscrapers, fewer convenience stores, and less fashion.
By the way, in addition to being an immoral idiot, Mr. Saito is also a hypocrite (a common problem on the left).
Mr. Saito’s critics have called him out for castigating the capitalist system he himself has benefited from… He recently moved into a three-story home in an upscale neighborhood..
It’s unfortunate that the New York Times decided to devote attention to a crank like Saito, though I guess it is somewhat newsworthy that he has sold 500,000 books.
So I won’t criticize the authors for writing the story. But I can’t resist pointing out some economic illiteracy in their report. They write about supposed problems with capitalism, but the Japanese policies they cite – easy money and wasteful spending – are examples of statism.
Mr. Saito has tapped into what he describes as a growing disillusionment in Japan with capitalism’s ability to solve the problems people see around them… Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, has worked for years to promote economic growth… But there are strong indications that the country’s…policies of ultracheap money and big government spending are reaching their limits. The interventions have done little to stimulate growth.
Keynesian policies didn’t work? At the risk of being overly sarcastic, I’m shocked, shocked.
I’ll close with a few general observations about Japanese economic policy.
The good news is that post-war capitalism enabled Japan to become reasonably prosperous.
But the bad news is that a range of misguided policies, starting with industrial policy in 1960s and 1970s and continuing with Keynesian spending and tax increases in the 1990s and beyond, have eroded Japan’s competitiveness. The nation is slowly but surely falling behind.
Mr Saito wants to accelerate his country’s decline. Hopefully Japanese policymakers will ignore his poisonous advice.
HowShouldWeThenLive Episode 5
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HowShouldweThenLive Episode 6
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Similarities between French Revolution and Communist Revolution
Schaeffer compares communism with French Revolution and Napoleon.
1. Lenin took charge in Russia much as Napoleon took charge in France – when people get desperate enough, they’ll take a dictator.
Other examples: Hitler, Julius Caesar. It could happen again.
2. Communism is very repressive, stifling political and artistic freedom. Even allies have to be coerced. (Poland).
Communists say repression is temporary until utopia can be reached – yet there is no evidence of progress in that direction. Dictatorship appears to be permanent.
3. No ultimate basis for morality (right and wrong) – materialist base of communism is just as humanistic as French. Only have “arbitrary absolutes” no final basis for right and wrong.
How is Christianity different from both French Revolution and Communism?
Contrast N.T. Christianity – very positive government reform and great strides against injustice. (especially under Wesleyan revival).
Bible gives absolutes – standards of right and wrong. It shows the problems and why they exist (man’s fall and rebellion against God).
Is Christianity at all like Communism?
Sometimes Communism sounds very “Christian” – desirable goals of equality, justice, etc. Schaeffer elsewhere explains by saying Marxism is a Christian heresy – Karl Marx
borrowed some of the ideals of N.T.
Below is a great article. Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
An Anniversary of Evil: 100 Years of Communism, 100 Million Deaths
October 30, 2017 by Dan Mitchell
Just in case you didn’t realize, we’re “celebrating” an anniversary.
In 1917, at this time of year, the Bolshevik revolution was occurring in Russia. 
It resulted in the creation of the Soviet Union, followed in subsequent decades by enslavement of Eastern Europe and communist takeovers in a few other unfortunate nations.
This is a very evil and tragic anniversary, a milestone that merits sad reflection because communism is an evil ideology, and communist governments have butchered about 100 million people.
I’ve written about the horrors that communism has imposed on the people of Cambodia, Cuba, and North Korea, but let’s zoom out and look at this evil ideology from a macro perspective.
My view is that communism is “a disgusting system…that leads to starvation and suffering” and “produces Nazi-level horrors of brutality.”
But others have better summaries of this coercive and totalitarian ideology.
We’ll start with A. Barton Hinkle’s column in Reason.
…the Bolsheviks…seized power from the provisional government that had been installed in the final days of Russia’s Romanov dynasty. The revolution ushered in what would become a century of ghastly sadism. …it is hard even now to grasp the sheer scale of agony imposed by the brutal ideology of collectivism.
…In 1997, a French publisher published “The Black Book of communism,” which tried to place a definitive figure on the number of people who died by communism’s hand: 65 million in China, 20 million in the Soviet Union, 2 million in Cambodia, 2 million in North Korea, and so on—more than 90 million lives, all told. …depravity was woven into the sinews of communism by its very nature. The history of the movement is a history of sadistic “struggle sessions” during the Cultural Revolution, of gulags and psychiatric wards in Russia, of the torture and murder of teachers, doctors, and other intellectuals in Cambodia, and on and on.
Here’s some of what Professor Ilya Somin wrote for the Washington Post.
May Day. Since 2007, I have defended the idea of using this date as an international Victims of Communism Day. …Our comparative neglect of communist crimes has serious costs.
Victims of Communism Day can serve the dual purpose of appropriately commemorating the millions of victims, and diminishing the likelihood that such atrocities will recur. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day and other similar events help sensitize us to the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and radical nationalism, so Victims of Communism Day can increase awareness of the dangers of left-wing forms of totalitarianism, and government control of the economy and civil society.
In an article for National Review, John O’Sullivan explains the tyrannical failure of communism.
Those evil deeds…include the forced famine in Ukraine that murdered millions in a particularly horrible fashion; starting the Second World War jointly with Hitler by agreeing in the Nazi–Soviet Pact to invade Poland and the Baltic states;
the Gulag in which millions more perished; and much more. …The Communist experiment failed above all because it was Communist. …Economically, the Soviet Union was a massive failure 70 years later to the point where Gorbachev complained to the Politburo that it exported less annually than Singapore. …it is a fantasy that the USSR compensated for these failures by making greater social gains than liberal capitalism: Doctors had to be bribed; patients had to take bandages and medicines into hospital with them; homelessness in Moscow was reduced by an internal passport system that kept people out of the city; and so on.
We’re just scratching the surface.
As an economist, I focus on the material failure of communism and I’ve tried to make that very clear with comparisons of living standards over time in Cuba and Hong Kong as well as in North Korea and South Korea.
But the evil of communism goes well beyond poverty and deprivation. It also is an ideology of mass murder.
Which is why this tweet from the Russian government is morally offensive.
Nazi Germany started #WWII and killed 27 millions Soviet people. USSR ended #WWII and saved the world from the Brown Plague#blackribbonday
Yes, the Soviet Union helped defeat the National Socialists of Germany, but keep in mind that Stalin helped trigger the war by inking a secret agreement with Hitler to divide up Poland.
Moreover, the Soviet Union had its own version of the holocaust.
I don’t know who put together this video, but it captures the staggering human cost of communism.
Meanwhile, Dennis Prager lists 6 reasons why communism isn’t hated the same way Nazism is hated.
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The only thing I can add to these videos is that there has never been a benign communist regime.
Indeed, political repression and brutality seems to be the key difference between liberal socialism and Marxist socialism.
Let’s close with this chart from Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute.
All forms of totalitarianism are bad, oftentimes resulting in mass murder. As Dennis Prager noted in his video, both communism and Nazism are horrid ideologies. Yet for some bizarre reason, some so-called intellectuals still defendthe former.
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