Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
How Dumb is Senator Jeff Flake?
Che looks on proudly, his victory complete at last
Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona and the Gang of Eight is one of two Republican senators accompanying President Obama to the socialist gulag of Cuba. (The other is Nevada’s Dean Heller.) Here’s Senator Flake’s explanation:
“We’re not embracing Cuba,” he said. “We’re actually, finally, imposing a get tough policy, because we’re going to expose them to American values and commerce.”
Flake said he hopes the Cuban trip will inspire the country’s leaders to adopt policies that help it move closer to a more capitalist society and help Arizonans realize what a Communist country is truly like.
“(They can see) what happens when the government controls not just the commanding heights of the economy, but the entire economy,” he said. “It’s a pretty sobering thought. For those who value socialism, or want to move closer to socialism, that’s a pretty good deterrent.”
Does he really think his visit is going to reveal the evils of socialism instead of being portrayed as a propaganda victory for the Castro regime?
And these “get tough” policies on Cuba, are they anything like the “Get tough” border security policies in the Gang of Eight bill that amounted to nothing more than politely requesting that Obama Administration prepare a border security plan and promising to spend a lot of money?
Update: The Marriott Corporation is one of Jeff Flake’s largest corporate donors. Also on the guest list for Obama’s Cuba trip … the CEO of the Marriott Corporation.
Published in Foreign Policy, General
Okay, for the purpose of increased productivity, the regime must provide the necessary nutrition to enable the workers to produce more efficiently, so hey, the workers are better fed and healthier, thereby benefiting from continued political oppression. It’s a kinder, gentler oppression. I get it now.
It is impossible to run a socialist state with the efficiency that a capitalist state runs itself because of lack of knowledge of all the individuals in the state. And it continues to get harder the bigger the state gets because there are more and more individuals. However, at a certain height this difficulty levels off because the state ceases to be a single administrative body, and it broken up into administrative regions. These socialist states are still centralized, but the central body delegates discretion to the regional lieutenants, who face the difficulty of knowledge themselves. The point being that, as far as the administrative problems are concerned, large socialist states (like any state) begin to increase the amount of lieutenants and districts at the same time as the state as a whole grows. So it is administered as a collection of socialist states guided by a generalized top despot. These were called Soviets in the USSR.
Indeed, did I ever claim that opening up to Cuba was the first step to making Cuba the 51st State and ready to vote for Ted Cruz in 2020?
You can trivialize it, but a “kinder, gentler” tyranny is a big deal when you are living under that tyranny.
And the more remote the local district is from the center (and the greater the number of bureaucratic levels) the weaker the control over the citizenry. Distant bureaucrats must be allowed a certain degree of autonomy. Based on the disparity of land mass alone, controlling Cuba and controlling China are entirely different problems. As for Vietnam, it’s people have always been able to move fairly easily across its borders. It is not a tiny island containing a captive population.
Do yourself a favor and drop your deterministic theory of communist states.
Of course, this only cements the tyranny in place. The well-fed worker drones would have no prospects for freedom.
I find it odd that a libertarian would approve of this outcome.
Firstly, there are increasing difficulties of managing large states, but it is not very significant when determining the future of a nation with regards to what direction it takes. In China, the regions that have seen market reforms have not been the far off provinces that are hard to control, they have been the coastal, heavily Mandarin and heavily populated regions at the center of the Chinese authority. If the communists liberalized out of a need to maintain control, why would they liberalize the regions in which communist control was cemented?
Secondly, we are comparing two deterministic views of the communist nations. One that says that opening up to the communist nations makes them become atleast glacially freer over time. The other says that isolating these nation will eventually lead to the people rising up and overthrowing the government.
History and Common Sense shows which one is right. Every communist nation that the West has opened trade relations with has seen glacial improvement. Every isolated communist state has seen a dramatic stagnation. Your fantasy that making the people of communist nations as miserable as possible in hopes that they rebel is a proven failure encouraged less by facts and reason than testosterone and ego. A revolution isn’t coming to North Korea, the people are too emaciated to rebel, they need all their efforts to scavenge for food. The same has been true of Cuba up to this time. What evidence do you have that the Cuban people are just itching for revolution; or that isolation has ever encouraged revolution in a communist state?
Think back to the fall off the Soviet block. The biggest factor was Gorbachev’s “Perestroika”, which led to just enough of a crack in the soviet regime to push the eastern block radically away from the Soviet Union. Perestroika, Russian for “Openness“, created the opportunity
Any previous rebellions in the Soviet block had been crushed, and the same is true of Cuba (remember Bay of Pigs?).
The facts are simple: dying people will not stage a revolution.