Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
I was in graduate school when Salvadore Allende was in power in Chile. I spent my summers doing field work in Canada, where the CBC covered events in Chile in far more detail than American networks did. Many of my colleagues traveled to Chile on a regular basis, spoke Spanish, and were ideologically sympathetic to Allende and his regime. Nevertheless, by the final months of his regime, it was becoming obvious even to the most sympathetic that the experiment wasn't working. Shelves were bare. It had been said that "Allende made it possible for the poor to buy meat." Indeed he did. What he never quite got the hang of was ensuring there would be a continuing supply of meat.
What told me the experiment was soon to go belly up was the announcement that the government was nationalizing the trucking industry. Trucking in many countries is largely independent. These weren't fat cats, they were working stiffs who'd saved up enough to buy a truck. And there was no imaginable benefit to nationalizing trucking. Where was the money? I had a mental image of ardent young Marxists rampaging though the country, overturning sofa cushions and looking for loose change. There had to be all that wealth somewhere. Here they'd done the Right Marxist Thing and taken over the means of production, only to find that all they had was empty factories and idle machinery.
One of my colleagues left Santiago only to land in New York and find that Allende had been overthrown in a coup (He allegedly committed suicide rather than be captured). Hard core Marxists insisted that Allende didn't take harsh enough measures to defend himself. He should have established a dictatorship of the proletariat and suppressed opposition. Instead the CIA teamed up with reactionary elements and overthrew him. Now I have no doubt the CIA cheered the rebels on and supplied them with planning and intelligence, but the idea that anyone in Latin America needs the help of the CIA to plan a coup is kind of insulting.
In a way, it's probably a good thing that Allende went down in a blaze of glory to be enshrined in Marxist Valhalla. Suppose he had cemented himself in power so solidly he couldn't be taken out? Suppose he and his supporters kept on applying Marxist economics for decades, heedless of the consequences, squeezing the productive class ever tighter? Well, the whole sad tale is being acted out in Zimbabwe Rhodesia - sorry, you get to name a country if you show you can run it competently. Robert Mugabe has been in power for 28 years, the economy is nonexistent, but he has achieved a bizarre triumph over inflation. At the last official reckoning, inflation was running at 100,000 per cent annually, then the finance ministry stopped calculating the rate. There were no longer enough goods for sale to establish a base line for prices. And shopkeepers in Rhodesia Zimbabwe - I've decided it's an insult to Rhodesia to apply the name to the current mess in Zimbabwe - can't even close their doors if they have nothing to sell because their shops will be seized.
It's very easy to eliminate poverty - temporarily. All you have to do is set prices so low that anyone can afford anything. The hard part is ensuring that anybody is willing to supply more goods once the stock on hand has been sold.
The housing bubble
air travel
energy
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Created 12 March 2007; Last Update 24 May, 2020
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