There has lately been a great deal of noise made locally about the joys
and merits of communism.
10 August 2011 | Stephen Mulhollad
Certainly this is an appropriate moment for the commies to have a go
at free enterprise democracy and its engine, which is the allocation of
resources according to the signals of the market rather than the
dictates of the state.
World markets are shaky, the US has been downgraded by Standard & Poor's
(who made a small $2-trillion error in their assessments), Europe is in
trouble, China in ascendancy and the world in economic trouble.
Commies will blame the markets for this mess. And they do this because
they do not have the faintest notion of what the market is. What it is,
of course, is simply the reflection of the decisions, hopes and fears of
billions around the world who every second make decisions about buying,
selling, holding, emigrating, building, spending, saving and so on.
This system of market capitalism is not perfect, but nothing is.
As Winston Churchill said of democracy, it is the worst system except
for all the others.
What we are witnessing today and at other times of turmoil in the
markets is the effect of wrong, reckless and misguided decisions by men
and women. The market is just a mirror. It is not evil nor is it virtuous.
It is a system in which the wishes and decisions of free people are
reflected in the allocation of resources and, as we are all imperfect,
markets will reflect these imperfections, giving out signals in the
shape of prices, scarcity or glut of supply and waning or rising demand.
Markets are self-correcting mechanisms, much as are our bodies. When we
eat and drink too much, our bodies give us signals that we must change
our ways. That's all the markets do: they give signals that what we are
doing is either right when we prosper and feel safe, or wrong when
values fall and we are fearful.
This imperfect and volatile mechanism has enabled man to make incredible
progress as individuals, in the words of Adam Smith, benefited humanity
in search of their personal progress or enrichment looking to the market
to discern what people want from the decisions of those people.
Mass production by Henry Ford, in his search for personal riches,
enabled millions of ordinary people all over the world to be able to
afford motor vehicles, which changed their lives, freeing them from
geographic prisons, making them mobile in a manner never before dreamt of.
All manner of useful products from Aspirin to the jet engine to
television to phones and later cellphones, Skype, computers and the
Internet, medical miracles and on and on flow not from the dead hand of
collectivism and conformity, but from free people seeking their chosen ends.
Thus, when an otherwise intelligent man like Cosatu's Zwelinzima Vavi
goes into lyrical praise of that back- water, Cuba, one wonders what
hope we have.
Vavi asks why our media do not "…expose our people to the great
achievements of the Cuban revolution … that demonstrate the availability
of alternatives to capitalism and the tyranny of the market?"
The tyranny of the market? Give us a break, Zwelinzima. Castro's Cuba
has been a hell of imprisonment, torture, rape and murder for anyone
daring in any way to differ with its unelected family dictatorship.
As there were no West Germans fleeing to communist East Germany, no
South Koreans fleeing to North Korea, no Hong-Kongers fleeing to Mao's
communist paradise, no free Europeans fleeing to the USSR; so the
traffic between the US and Cuba has all been one way. Why?
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