RSS

Sat, Feb 21st 2009, 19:34

Joe Noory

The suppositions behind this article are specious. The COMECON states had numerous contractions. What they couldn't do was boom because the structure of how adaptation to changes production, export, and consumption forces were slow and based in the social theory endemic to absolutist central control where sampling a variety of courses of actions and options were slow and limited.

One theory of resource flow goes that Communist economies contract by nature, and growth in them is the anomoly. Having lived in it, I tend to agree. Dictating output and uptake and the associated inputs always produced more shortfalls than surplusses, and forced social mores reduce productivity, all of which is the very definition of contraction or at the very least an artificial drag on growth.

Sat, Feb 21st 2009, 22:58

Donald Stadler, Self-employed, Diamond Contributor (1052)

Joe, While I might would agree that communism had problems with growth, and that is what ultimately brought it down, the basic premise of the article is that capitalistic societies are in the end self-correcting, with the failures being sold out and turned to new uses. Crisises are the means by which this is accomplished. I think that is a sound description of what is happening now.

Communist economies have had periods of expansion. The USSR had it's NEP (admittedly a largely capitalistic program), and there was a post-WWII economic expansion as well, fueled by recovery and by the looting of East Germany and Eastern Europe to some degree. This period was the basis for Krushchev's boast that "We will crush you". But apart from periods of economic recovery I think you are correct, that communist socieities had difficulty expanding.