Tom Sherman <
[email protected]> writes:
> Tim McNamara wrote:
>
>>>On Thu, 01 Jul 2004 00:05:36 -0500, Tom Sherman
>>><[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>>> While consumer goods were in short supply and often of poor
>>>> quality, no one went without the basic necessities (unlike the US
>>>> and other capitalist countries).
>
>> You mean like bread and meat and toilet paper, which you had to
>> stand in lines for hours to get and even then the supplies
>> frequently ran out before you got yours? Joe Average Soviet went
>> without basic necessities not infrequently....
>
> In the post Stalin era Soviet Union, hunger and homelessness were
> practically eliminated, and almost everyone had access to basic
> medical care, clean water, and proper sanitation.
You've apparently never actually been to the Soviet Union during that
time frame, then, not spoken with people who lived under that regime.
I have had the pleasure of the latter, and have had family members and
friends who were able to do the former.
The fantasy presented to the world by the Soviet censors was far from
reality. Theonly reason people didn't starve was because they grew
their own food, not because there was a functioning distribution or
market system to get food to them. Bread was about the only well
distributed foodstuff.
"Basic" is the operative word when describing the medical care
available under the Sviet system. For example, most hospitals did not
provide food for the patients- families had to bring food in from
home. Access to medicines was limited, with hospitals frequently
being short on basic necessities.
> Crime was low, and personal safety was not an issue at most times
> and places. Compare that to what occurs when the government does not
> enforce a social contract and favors capital over labor - ever major
> city has large areas with concentrated poverty, homelessness and
> crime.
Every major city in the Soviet Union had its own organized crime
problems, usually with enough money to corrupt and bribe the local
government representatives. The Soviet Union was not Shangri-la and
enforced the "social contract" in the ways that served its own
interests exclusively. That worked as long as the people believed
they were working for the greater good; when they realized they
weren't and they were just being screwed, the Soviet Union fell. That
actually had little to do with Ronald Reagan's grandstanding in
Germany or his policies, Republican claims to the contrary.
> While the centralized command economy combined with an authoritarian
> government (Leninism) has enough faults to remove it from
> consideration of contenders for the type of government that will
> provide the overall highest quality of life, it should be judged on
> its real merits and demerits, not by an ideological knee-jerk
> reaction.
As I am regularly accused of being a socialist in these newsgroups by
the right wing nutters, I hardly think my response was "knee-jerk" or
"ideological." If you'd been paying attention to my posts in the "I
was misled" thread (which I've abandoned due to the pathetic nastiness
that developed), you'd know better. The simple fact is that communism
and socialism are unsustainable forms of government, as has been
demonstrated repeatedly around the world. Modified socialism- e.g.,
democracy with a strong centralized social safety net- has been more
sustainable than the Soviet-style approach. Whether that
sustainability continues with shrinking workforces and growing elderly
populations remains to be seen. Even China, the last stronghold of
communism, has seen the need for freeing the markets and permitting
the development of wealth and private entrepreneurship.
Don't take that as an endorsement, however, of the warped system of
legalized bribery that the American government has become. 200 years
of progress towards democracy has been reversed since 1980, resulting
instead in the progress of Big Brother running hard and fast in the
service of his sociopathic corporate masters.
