Zebra, I've found this thread most interesting of late, thank you for carrying water for us free-marketeers. I tend to forget sometimes, living as I do in a place where all but a very few fringe-dwellers at least kowtow to the idea of capitalism and free enterprise, that in much of the world there are large numbers of people who distrust capitalism and still pine for communism.
The events of the past decade-plus have been hard on the communists. A large part of the premise of Marxism was that there was an historical inevitability that communism would triumph. When history went in the opposite direction it proved Marx and Company wrong. It must have been horribly disorienting to have one's faith conclusively disproven. Nonetheless when you get used to prevarication, as most communists did, it's not too hard to overlook reality and keep going the same direction despite evidence to the contrary. I guess if I had sacrificed for an ideology and the ideology failed, I would likewise be inclined to stubbornly hold on to the fallen faith I had long embraced. It reminds me of the occasional religious sects which insist that the world will end on a specific date, then still manage to keep on going when the date comes and nothing happens.
So now that the original model has failed, it looks like the communists have moved to a new model, based on the EU. The problem with the old model was that communism can't tolerate competition. Even with roughly half the world under their rule, the competition from the other half did them in. In order for communism to succeed, they have to be sure they get the entire world. They couldn't, and know they can't, get it militarily. But what the EU has done is get the nations to surrender a small bit of their sovereignty, then slowly expand that control bureaucratically. Now, far from being just a trade union as was originally envisioned, the EU controls everything from what a farmer can grow, to whether a country must allow homosexuals in the military. International efforts like the Tobin tax, the international criminal court, and the Kyoto treaty, are efforts to use the EU model on an international scale.
There's my rant. Take it for what it's worth. |
