Ah, the good old days of U.S Foreign Policy

Socialism Does NOT Lead To Marxism

Socialism Does NOT Lead To Marxism.  Not all the time, anyway.  
But it does have a fairly consistent record of leading to cannibalism.  

I was doing some research on the total disaster known as North Korea.  Parents over there are eating their children.  Go here.  Parents are eating their children.  Parents are eating their children.  (On the upside, North Koreans have free healthcare, excellent gun control, and less of an income gap between rich and poor than the capitalist countries.)

I found this gem on Libertarian Reddit.  The blog from which it came has been taken down, but the horrors mentioned below are well-documented elsewhere.  

Freeze prices, take away the free market, eliminate incentives, eliminate property rights, all "for the common good" and for "fairness", and people will start eating each other.  It really is that simple.  

Socialists are everywhere these days. They loosely model themselves after the hippy movement; they drink PBR, smoke from elaborate bongs, and pretentiously advocate a form of socialism that they can’t quite define. They are unapologetically anti-American, anti-West, and usually, they aren’t worth anyone’s time, but lately, it has become overwhelming, so I would just like them to know one thing: socialism (i.e. abandoning property rights), wherever it has been tried, in whatever form, on whatever scale, has resulted in starvation and cannibalism. I compiled just a few examples for you:

North Korea: “We started seeing cannibalism. When one is very hungry, one can go crazy. One woman in my town killed her 7-month-old baby, and ate the baby with another woman. That woman's son reported them both to the authorities. I can't condemn cannibalism. Not that I wanted to eat human meat, but we were so hungry. It was common that people went to a fresh grave and dug up a body to eat meat. I witnessed a woman being questioned for cannibalism. She said it tasted good.”

Ukraine: “Some went insane. They never did become completely still. One could tell from their eyes–because their eyes shone. These were the people who cut up and cooked corpses, who killed their own children and ate them. In them the beast rose to the top as the human being died. I saw one. She had been brought to the district center under convoy. Her face was human, but her eyes were those of a wolf. These are cannibals.”

Soviet Union: “It is now and only now, when in the regions afflicted by the famine there is cannibalism and the roads are littered with hundreds if not thousands of corpses, that we can (and therefore must) pursue the acquisition of [church] valuables with the most ferocious and merciless energy, stopping at nothing in suppressing all resistance.” –Lenin

China: “Most of the culprits on the list practiced necrophagy, either eating those who had passed away or exhuming and eating cadavers after burial. When a team of inspectors was sent to review the Quiatou commune in Shizhu county, Sichuan, in early 1961, they were startled by the extent of cannibalism. In some cases, only parts of a body were eaten Zemin’s heart, for instance, was scooped out. Some people covered the meat in hot peppers.” (p. 323)

Cambodia: “When I got to the spot, I hid in a thicket from which I could watch the “ceremony” without being seen. But I was so horrified by what I saw that I nearly fainted. The condemned man was tied to a tree, his chest bare and blindfold over his eyes. Ta Sok, the executioner, using a large knife made a cut in the stomach of the poor man. In pain, the man screamed like a wild beast. Even today his cires still ring in my ears. Blood rushed out everywhere, his insides were all laid bare, and Ta Sok cut out his liver and cooked it on a little stove that Ta Chea had just heated up. They divided up the liver among them and ate it hungrily.” Another witness reports, “They ate many human livers this way.”

Angola: "The commander gave Kakule his knife, told him to pare the skin from an arm, a leg. He told Kakule and his other assistant to build a fire. From their satchels, the soldiers brought cassava bread. They sat in a circle. The commander placed the dead man's head at the center. He forced the two loggers to sit with them, to eat with them the pieces of boiled limb. The grilled liver, tongue and genitals had already been parceled out among the commander and his troops."

Jamestown, VA:  (Yes, Jamestown was founded as a Socialist Paradise.  The failed experiment ended when their government said "every man for himself".  The settlement then prospered.  Hit the Thanksgiving label at the bottom of this post. - TWS)  “So great was our famine that a savage we slew and buried, the poorer sorte tooke him up againe and eat him; and so did divers one another boyled and stewed with roots and herbs. It were too vile to say and scarce to be believed, what we endured: but the occasion was our own, for want of providence, industrie and government, and not the barrennesse and defect of the Country, as is generally supposed.”

“Can you really find anyone who is guilty? Just go and ask, and they will all tell you that they did it for the sake of virtue, for everybody’s good. That’s why they drove mothers to cannibalism.” -Ukraine

Stop The Presses ! ! ! !

China and Russia are now using the yuan and the ruble in their trade relationships. 
They used to use the dollar. 
Why the change?  Why is everyone suddenly abandoning the dollar as the currency of international trade?

We're printing too many dollars. 
Why does it matter which currency the rest of the world uses for these exchanges?  Go here. 

The dollar reserve currency status allows the U.S. to run up high deficits and have its debt be denominated in the U.S. dollar, which in turn enables it to print unlimited dollars and inflate its way out of debt. America, understandably, wants to protect these privileges.


The rest of the world is not populated with economic idiots who believe that we can spend our way out of debt.  They also won't use dollars if we're going to try to print our way out of debt. 
It really is that simple. 

Adventures In Price Setting

This if from "The Turning Point", by Nikolai Shmelev and Vladmir Popov. Shmelev and Popov were economists in the former Soviet Union, a resume stain that I hope they've been able to overcome.
I've seen references to this story for years, but had no idea as to the original source. Its about what happens when government gets into the price-setting business instead of allowing prices to fluctuate on their own. This story happens to be about fur. .

"When Alice eats or drinks something in Wonderland, she either begins to shrink or becomes enormous, and she can't get back to her normal size. In actual fact Goskomtsen (the Soviet price-setting bureau) finds itself in a similar situation. It systematically either underestimates or overestimates the atual cost of a product and cannot "hit the nail on the head". At best, it is able only to correct the most obvious price disproportions several years after they appear.
In 1982, for example, to stimulate production of goods made of inexpensive fur, purchasing prices on moleskin were raised from 20 to 50 kopecks per pelt. State purchases increased, and now all the distribution centers are filled with these pelts. Industry is unable to use them all, and they often rot in warehouses before they can be processed. The Ministry of Light Industry has already requested Goskomtsen twice to lower purchasing prices, but the "question has not been decided" yet. and this is not surprising. Its members are too busy to decide. They have no time: besides setting prices on these pelts, they have to keep track of another 24 million prices. And how can they possibly know how much to lower the price today so they won't have to raise it tomorrow?"

Well, they could stay out of it altogether, and let vendors try to sell fur for as much as possible, and let customers try to purchase it for as little as possible, and the Invisible Hand will determine at what price the transaction will take place.

On a related note, here's what has happened when California's government put a .05 cent bounty on aluminum cans. The idea was to conserve, be green, and save the earth. Instead, people are flocking to California with their aluminum.

Thomas Sowell says it over and over and over, and we still don't get it. Programs and policies should be judged and evaluated in terms of the incentives they create, not their stated goals and objectives.

Because Wal-Mart Gift Certificates Would've Seemed Tacky

I haven't been keeping up with She Whose Name Is Not Spoken. Turns out that she's been in Russia.
Here's David Cloud, writing for Politico.

After promising to “push the reset button” on relations with Moscow, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton planned to present Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a light-hearted gift at their talks here Friday night to symbolize the Obama administration’s desire for a new beginning in the relationship.

It didn’t quite work out as she planned.

She handed him a palm-sized box wrapped with a bow. Lavrov opened it and pulled out the gift—a red plastic button on a black base with a Russian word “peregruzka” printed on top.


“We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” Clinton said as reporters, allowed in to observe the first few minutes of the meeting, watched.

“You got it wrong,” Lavrov said, to Clinton’s clear surprise.

Instead of "reset," he said the word on the box meant “overcharge.”



Oh well, it's only the freakin' State Department. They shouldn't be expected to have any staff members who speak Russian.

There was another exchange of gifts going down....This gift swap was between President Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Brown.... gave the president and his children several uniquely historical gifts.
The first of which is a pen holder fashioned from the oak timber of HMS Gannet, a Navy vessel that served on anti-slavery missions off Africa.
Another treasure given to Obama is a framed commissioning paper for the HMS Resolute, a Royal Navy ship that came to symbolize British-American goodwill when it was rescued by the U.S. from icebergs and given to Queen Victoria. It is the sister ship of the HMS Gannet.
Finally, Brown gave Obama a first edition of Martin Gilbert's seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill, whose World War II partnership with President Franklin Roosevelt symbolized the U.S.-Anglo alliance.
For Sasha and Malia, Sarah Brown, the Prime Minister's wife, gave each an outfit from Topshop, a British chain of clothing stores, and selected six children's books by British authors which have yet to be published in the U.S.

Lordy, that's impressive. The Martin Gilbert 1st editions are to kill for, BTW. And what did we give the British Prime Minister?

President Obama on Thursday gave British Prime Minister Gordon Brown a set of 25 classic American movies to mark his historic visit to the White House.
Brown, the first European leader to visit Obama since his Jan. 20 inauguration, was presented with a "special collector's box" of DVDs during his two-day visit to Washington.
Downing Street, which reportedly tried to keep the present a secret, declined to say what movies were included in the set.
One reason for the secrecy might be that the gift seems markedly less generous and thoughtful than the presents taken to Washington by the Prime Minister," London's Evening Standard newspaper reported.

Well, yeah. Imagine giving someone a desk set whittled out of a legendary ship, and getting a copy of E.T. in return.

The Daily Mail, however, reported the movie set included ET, Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz and was produced by the American Film Institute on "special request" from the White House.

Produced by "special request" ? Horsecrap. I bet they sent an intern to pick them up at a Sam's Club.

Anyway, these are the people who want to take over medicine, the banks, more of education, Wall Street, GM, and the weather.

I'm sure they'll get it right.

Why Communism Failed, Part 2

Since the first Why Communism Failed post was so popular....

Only in Russia… has a collection of Russia pics that make my China collections seem almost post-modern.
I'm about halfway through an old book called "The Turning Point", which explains the need for every architectural and mechanical improvisation you see in the pictures.

The authors, a pair of Russian economists, explain how and why every supply chain in the nation broke down.

The need to get into a tanning bed wearing long sleeves and an ankle length skirt, however, remains a mystery.

Enjoy the pictures.