Swastikas and Hammer and Sickles

While getting a glass of water at school today a schoolmate walked over. His shirt was colorful and it looked like it might have been from Firefly, so I looked at it.

It was a communist shirt.

After spending years of my life studying political economy at school and reading all of the great political philosophers I have come up with two major points on communism.

1. The only major issue Lenin and Marx disagreed on was whether communism would evolve naturally from society or whether it could be sped up and skip over the capitalist stage. Everything else is identical and the Soviet Union was an accurate implementation of Marxist thought.
2. The Communists and Fascists have one big difference between them in terms of how their countries function. Communists are more likely to kill you. (based on the death tolls of the Holocaust vs. Holodomor, Great Chinese Famine, Gulags, and multiple other artificial famines across the Eastern Bloc in the 20th century)

This is why when I see someone wearing a hammer and sickle I feel deeply offended. I have friends in the Soviet Union, and my older friends there were close to people who were murdered by the Soviet despots. The other thing is that the Soviet Union would have stayed allied with Hitler to the end of World War II if Hitler hadn't been the biggest tactical idiot of the 20th century with his decision to invade. They had no problem with the Holocaust and had a record of antisemitism themselves. That is why the Jewish Autonomous Oblast exists today. It is a legacy of extreme anti-semitism. Yet another similarity between Communism and Fascism.

The worst part of all is that this fool decided to wear a hammer and sickle on 4/20, the biggest holiday for Fascists.

Please don't wear Hammer and sickle shirts. This German American whose family lived through the Third Reich has friends in the Republic of Georgia and Russia. I find them highly offensive and just DON'T DO IT. Just throw on your Iron Cross and Swastika over your hood while brandishing the flag of ISIS if you feel like you have to display offensive imagery. Just DON'T DO IT without understanding the history of the imagery you are displaying in public.

Just DON'T DO IT.

Schools Of Thought In Modern Politics: Part 3: Understanding the theoretical roots of economic policy

In my final post about different schools of thought and modern politics, a central question is how do we determine whether countries are more liberal or socialist in their policies while still maintaining the academic meaning of those words, which I have already defined by analyzing the views of the people who founded these schools of thought.

Before determining which school of thought dominates the country's economic policies, we first must construct a test to determine which school it most represents.

1. Does this country have price controls? How ubiquitous are they? (Price controls are a feature of mercantilism and socialism. Liberals oppose price controls.)
2. What percentage of manufacturing does your country control? (Control of manufacturing by the government is a feature of socialism. It can be a feature of mercantilism. Liberals favor private industry in competitive markets, but generally support intervention in monopolies.)
3. Does your government protect businesses from competition? (Mercantilists and Socialists oppose the free market. Liberals favor low barriers to entry to the market.)
4. Where do parties stand on interracial issues, if interracial issues exist in your country? (Liberals are concerned about ending such inequalities, Fascists are opposed to minorities, Socialists believe the real division is between classes)
5. How much influence does the average person have in government? (This determines how much corruption there is in government, Corruption Perceptions Index is a good metric)

Some questions are not defining features of any major school of thought and only controversial in sub-branches. The regulation of monopolies has been favored by most liberal economists since Adam Smith for example, and public education was a prominent feature of John Stuart Mill's extremely liberal writings, so I have omitted such issues. These four questions aim towards the root differences in today's world.

If we were then to analyze different country's policies, and more importantly the difference between different parties domestically and international, we can get a general idea of the ideological leanings of the major world players.

In the United States, each party is ambiguous about price controls. Democrats generally push for policies which will push prices down for the poor, but this is a completely separate and very liberal mechanism. Republicans do not support price controls, so this makes them look liberal. The second question also puts both parties as liberal. The third question however is where the picture gets more complicated. A number of politicians will support reforms like minimum wages, but minimum wages have disadvantages like other price controls, which is normally seen in a surplus of labor from our basic supply and demand graph. The other word for this surplus is unemployment. Another form of price controls we frequently see is in agriculture. The government keeps the supply of food low to keep the price high enough to support farmers profit yields. This is definitely not a neoliberal policy (who would generally support no price controls) and creates inefficiencies, while there are other issues with agriculture like food security that makes it a much more complicated issue.

When it comes to having a more open or closed market, this is similarly ambiguous.
In conclusion for the series. Today's politics has seen a  rapid reduction in true socialists who would call for the collectivization of production.

When it comes to racial inequality, we start to see some divergence between parties on ethnic questions. Democrats are far more likely to support human rights legislation than the Republican party, and most Republicans view such legislation which reaches out to minorities as being "bailouts" or other disparaging terms. Fascism still has some influence in terms of immigration policy in the US and Europe, and how different regions respond to issues like police shootings which have a massive racial component.

The other major issue today which we observe with the influence of the average person in government is widely apparent with far more Democrats supporting campaign finance reform than Republicans. This is one wedge issue which paints a difference in access to government between our two parties. This wedge pits politicians who support a government which works for all and is based in liberty against politicians who exist to serve their higher-ups and are corrupt. It definitely is not a guarantee that a member of either party will fit cleanly in the organization, but is a trend which makes them clearly different from each other to close observers.

This conflict between liberty and corruption is the true ideological conflict between parties in American and European politics today. The idea of access to the economy and government for all people is a fundamental distinction between the two major parties. There is still some role for fascist vs. liberal thought in modern politics as a significant driver, but this does not extend to the questions of campaign finance and how the government spends most of its money.

Beware the pigs

In the 1880s the British South Africa Company moved into what is modern day Zimbabwe and got a concession from the King for mining rights in the region in 1888. The British started to enslave Zimbabweans and established settlements of Englishmen. The natives no longer had any sovereignty and over the next 60 years until the 1950s they were in a feudal system. The colonial era saw the resources of the people of Africa be stolen by the colonial powers. This ended when the Africans grew tired of their colonial oppressors and formed independence movements to have more rights. In 1963 Rhodesia gained independence along with other African nations in that era, after which they were led by Ian Smith until 1979. Rhodesia was set up so there were separate voter rolls for people based on property (not indifferent from the United States when we were founded where you had to own land to vote) which effectively gave the landed white settlers most of the political power despite being a minority. In this era the government reserved a majority of seats in Parliament for whites and made it almost impossible for African political parties to get enough power to represent the majority. The way Rhodesia was set up was being decreed as racist by the rest of the world. (Source: Wikipedia) Of course, we can't blame Ian Smith completely because he was merely a figurehead of a massive governmental organization which was nominally democratic for those who had land, and was outspoken on supporting Mandela while the United States and Israel maintained good relations with the Apartheid regime, and he had started to work to try to bring majority rule to Rhodesia before 1979. It is easy to demonize him given that he was president of a country with minority rule (and while I started writing this article I found myself falling into the same trap given similarities between him and other African leaders who led for such long periods of time) but it is important to look at an individual with the context of his time and place and the power dynamics at play to diagnose the entire system as being racist and not blaming everything on the head of state when there is a congress or parliament with considerable power.

In 1979 however Mugabe came to power, under the guise of freeing Zimbabweans from their white oppressors. He promised progress and change, but his economic reforms quickly turned the country into one of the poorest and most backwards in the entire world. He has established a one-party rule where anyone who speaks against his regime is arrested or killed, frequently landing near the bottom of the rankings of all freedom indexes. He did not become as so many hoped a figure for freedom for all Africans and has frequently committed crimes against other tribes, and the white minority who are for the most part disenfranchised and have left Zimbabwe as refugees. He tries to portray himself as black empowerment and given how Africans have been abused for so many generations many see this as a good thing, but no one chooses the color of their skin and even though it isn't in the order we usually think of when it comes to racist regimes Mugabe is indeed a racist and continues to pursue policies which have made Zimbabwe a backwards state for all Zimbabweans, including targeting certain tribes of natives disspelling any notion of him being a freedom fighter for Africans.

This is in comparison to South Africa where after the truly brutal racist regime that lasted almost 50 years Nelson Mandela rose to lead South Africa to become the most economically advanced nation in Africa whose speed of economic development is close to that of China. He did this not by looking at it in terms of an us vs. them mentality but as a real liberal tried to bring all South Africans to a place where they could leave peacefully without creating a refugee crisis. They are now the freest nation in Africa for native Africans and all people compared to all other nations on the continent. The rights of people in nations in Africa where they didn't look for a multilateral liberty-based approach but instead a Marxist relativist approach where it is seen as a conflict between different classes (which were deeply aligned with people's ancestry being either European or African for the most part) have not improved since decolonization and their standard of living is the worst in the world.

When trying to advance rights for one group of people, be it Africans in Africa, women across the world, homosexuals, transsexuals, and other groups it is paramount to not turn it into an us vs. them mentality but attempt to make the value of all men being created equal a reality. A rising tide raises all boats.

Freedom in the world does not have a limited quantity and the amount of freedom in a society goes up and down over time. When one person gets the ability to speak freely this does not mean another person cannot publish their thoughts as much. My writing this blog without my government cracking down on me if I say something they do not like does not prevent another person from writing a blog of their own. This is how the world works and the great thinkers of liberalism, John Locke, America's founding fathers, and John Stuart Mill all understood this. When Europe passed the Schengen treaty the average amount of freedom in the world increased, but the amount of freedom that Americans had did not decrease because the border between Germany and Poland was opened. This is also of course what happened in Animal Farm by George Orwell who noticed this in the USSR and ended with one of the greatest quotes of modern literature, "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." which is applicable in Zimbabwe.

When expanding the rights of one group we need to ensure that we don't also make it harder for one group to have what they deserve. When we continue to expand rights for African Americans across the United States so that those who live in poor communities (because not all African Americans are poor) have police services that respect them we need to deal with the problem directly by implementing laws that hold police accountable for their actions so that they keep their actions within the law which doesn't always happen which is a great shame on our entire nation. Decreasing the quality of police in majority-white areas will not make people in majority-African American areas more free, in fact I would expect it would have the opposite effect. We need to write laws that directly address the issue along with caveats which will inevitably occur so that we can have programs that work effectively.

If we don't we will end up being no better than Robert Mugabe who talked about a Zimbabwe where Africans would be free only to turn back on his progress and make it worse for all Zimbabweans. We must be true liberals and focus on the rights as the end goal and divorce ourselves from the notion of one group always being the oppressor and one group always being the oppressed, because roles can and at times have switched in brutal fashion. When we realize this we can have freedom.