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01 / 05
Life Under Communism Was No Liberation For Women

Blog Post | Wealth & Poverty

Life Under Communism Was No Liberation For Women

Nostalgic accounts of life under communism avoid the broader perspective of widespread oppression and economic failure.

Over the last few months, The New York Times has published a number of warm and nostalgic recollections of communism. Authors have opined about the supposed optimism, idealism, and moral authority of communism. Perhaps the most bizarre article so far claimed that women behind the Iron Curtain enjoyed greater sexual satisfaction and more independence than their Western counterparts (except, of course, when it came to freedom of thought, speech, religion, association, or movement).

I would have chosen to commemorate 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution and the birth of the Soviet Union in a different way. Over 100,000,000 people have died or were killed while building socialism during the course of the 20th century. Call me crazy, but that staggering number of victims of communism seems to me more important than the somewhat dubious claim that Bulgarian comrades enjoyed more orgasms than women in the West. But as one Russian babushka said to another, suum cuique pulchrum est.

I am, however, intrigued by the striking similarities between the Times articles. To the greatest extent possible, they seem to avoid the broader perspective on life under communism (i.e., widespread oppression and economic failure). Instead, they focus on the experiences of individual people, some of whom never lived in communist countries in the first place.

In “When Communism Inspired Americans,” the author remembers her socialist parents and the life of the communist sympathizers in 1950s America. In “Thanks to Mom, the Marxist Revolutionary,” the author remembers his batty mother, who dragged him from one communist hellhole to another in search of a “real world” experience. In “‘Make It So’: ‘Star Trek’ and Its Debt to Revolutionary Socialism,” the author quotes Captain Picard, who explains to a cryogenically unfrozen businessman from the 20th century, “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.”

Speaking of hunger and infancy, here are some completely gratuitous eyewitness accounts of parents eating their own children during the man-made famine in Ukraine in the 1930s. Communism may have influenced science fiction writers, but real life in the USSR was no picnic.

“Where did all bread disappear, I do not really know, maybe they have taken it all abroad. The authorities have confiscated it, removed from the villages, loaded grain into the railway coaches and took it away someplace. They have searched the houses, taken away everything to the smallest thing. All the vegetable gardens, all the cellars were raked out and everything was taken away. Wealthy peasants were exiled into Siberia even before Holodomor during the ‘collectivization.’ Communists came, collected everything….People were laying everywhere as dead flies. The stench was awful. Many of our neighbors and acquaintances from our street died….Some were eating their own children. I would have never been able to eat my child. One of our neighbors came home when her husband, suffering from severe starvation, ate their own baby daughter. This woman went crazy.”

One has to wait until “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism,” to meet an actual Eastern European. “Consider Ana Durcheva from Bulgaria,” the author writes, “who was 65 when I first met her in 2011. Having lived her first 43 years under Communism, she often complained that the new free market hindered Bulgarians’ ability to develop healthy amorous relationships. ‘Sure, some things were bad during that time, but my life was full of romance.'” Durcheva’s daughter, in contrast, works too much, “and when she comes home at night she is too tired to be with her husband.”

What are we to make of this? Are we merely to deduce that the life of a young and, apparently, attractive woman behind the Iron Curtain was not completely devoid of pleasure? No. The article is explicit in stating that “communist women enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency that few Western women could have imagined.”

This is unadulterated rubbish. I grew up under communism, and here is what I recall.

First, all communist countries were run by men; female leaders, like Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, would have been unthinkable. Women who rose to prominence, like Raisa Gorbachev and Elena Ceausescu, did so purely as appendages of their powerful husbands.

Second, the author concedes that “gender wage disparities and labor segregation persisted, and…the communists never fully reformed domestic patriarchy.” I would say so. In a typical Eastern European family, the woman, in addition to having a day job at a factory, was expected to clean the apartment, shop for food, cook dinner, and raise the children. The Western sexual revolution passed the communist bloc by, and ex-communist countries remain much more patriarchal than their Western counterparts to this day.

Third, communist societies were socially uber-conservative. As such, pornography and prostitution were strictly prohibited, divorces were discouraged and divorced people ostracized, and prophylactics and the pill were hard to obtain. (Think about it for one hot second. Why would economies unable to produce enough bread and toilet paper generate a plentiful and regular supply of condoms? This makes no sense!) The reason why we refer to communist countries as “totalitarian” is because the state wanted to control every aspect of human existence. Sexual autonomy was, well, autonomous. Being outside the control of the all-powerful state, it was treated with suspicion and suppressed.

But don’t take my word for it. You can still visit a few communist countries, including Cuba and North Korea, and compare the social status and empowerment of their women with those in the West. Had the esteemed editors of the Times done so, they would have, I hope, thought twice about publishing a series of pro-communist excreta.

Blog Post | Economics

Capitalism, the Keystone of Modern Prosperity

Despite the rise of anti-capitalism across the political spectrum, Johan Norberg sheds important light on the benefits and major advances brought about by capitalism.

This article was originally published at Contrepoints on 11/1/2023.

Good news for fans of bipartisanship: even in today’s hypercharged political environment, an increasing number of people on both sides of the aisle agree on something! Unfortunately, it’s a notion that, if incorrect, could undermine the policies and institutions that form the very foundation of the modern world. The newfound area of agreement is the idea that capitalism, globalization, and free markets have failed.

Indeed many of the ideas expressed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their magnum opusThe Communist Manifesto, are gaining ground. Obsession with class warfare now transcends political tribes, dominating both the halls of deep blue academia and the lyrics of the chart-topping anthem of the “new right,” Rich Men North of Richmond. A swelling bipartisan chorus of voices dismiss laissez-faire economics as out-of-date. The complexities of the modern world, they claim, require robust government action to support domestic industries, repatriate risk-ridden globalized supply chains, and protect domestic markets from the vicissitudes of international competition.

Recent polling shows that only around 21 percent of Americans hold a very positive view of capitalism, dropping to just 11 percent among those under age 30. Mounting skepticism toward capitalism is not restricted to the United States; from Latin America to Europe, anticapitalism is all the rage. For example, a majority of French adults, 62 percent, express a negative view of capitalism.

In this age of growing derision toward the system of free enterprise, there is a man who stands athwart the anticapitalist zeitgeist declaring, “The global free market will save the world.” Who is this individual who dares to express such an unfashionable view? “No one is particularly keen on globalization now,” observed journalist Po Tidholm on Swedish Public Radio in 2020, “except possibly Johan Norberg.”

Norberg, a Swedish author and historian of ideas and a colleague of mine at the Cato Institute, wears the accusation with pride, quoting it at the start of his latest book, The Capitalist Manifesto. Given the current intellectual climate, the timing of the U.S. release of the book could not be better.

He was not the first to come up with the title; prior Capitalist Manifesto authors include Robert Kiyosaki, Andrew Bernstein, Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler. As Norberg notes, there is only one Communist Manifesto, but there are many capitalist manifestos—appropriately, as capitalism allows for a diversity of thought.

Norberg’s prior books include In Defense of Global Capitalism, which, as its title suggests, mounted a defense of free enterprise—against the system’s vocal leftist critics. But in the two decades since that book’s publication, expressing hatred of capitalism has become a bipartisan pastime in vogue among populists on both the left and right alike. In light of this trend, The Capitalist Manifesto presents an updated, sorely needed, and eloquent restatement of the principles of free market.

The book addresses the most frequent criticisms leveled against markets today and generally seeks to rehabilitate capitalism’s image in the mind of the skeptical modern reader. As business magnate Elon Musk put it in a recent post, “This book is an excellent explanation of why capitalism is not just successful, but morally right.”

How can Norberg, Musk, or indeed anyone remain enthusiastic about a system that so many people spanning the political spectrum now agree has been a failure? Examining the last couple of decades, the book acknowledges they have been filled with shocks, wars, and failures. Examining the problems of the last 20 years, including financial crises, violence in the Middle East, an industrial-scale war in Europe, various other disasters, and of course a global pandemic, Norberg never shies away from recognizing the bad. But, the last 20 years, he argues, despite so many devastating catastrophes, have nonetheless been the best years in all of human history.

How is that possible? Step back and examine the trendlines. A third of all wealth ever created was created over these last two decades alone. Over the last 20 years, during every minute of complaining about how global capitalism has wrecked the world, over 90 people climbed out of destitution. Child mortality has fallen so dramatically that the number of annual child deaths is down by millions compared to a decade ago even as the total population has grown.

The greatest progress occurred in the countries that most integrated into the global economy. Why is that? The miraculous problem-solving capacity of human beings that allows us to improve our conditions—if given the freedom to do so. Hence countries in the economically freest quartile enjoy more than twice the average per capita income of less free countries.

Capitalism’s haters fail to recognize modern prosperity’s origins. Norberg characterizes well-off anticapitalist thinkers such as Thomas Piketty this way: “taking pride in ignoring what’s going on down there, in garages, in shops and factories, and how that might relate to the fact he lives in history’s richest civilization.”

But, the anticapitalist might protest, modern abundance rests atop a proverbial house of cards. Surely the pandemic revealed the unacceptable fragility of globalized markets?

Yet pandemic shortages proved short-lived as entrepreneurs found ways to adjust the manufacturing process to changing conditions. In many cases, companies with more complex supply chains actually adjusted faster than those with less complex supply chains, because they had more options and found alternative suppliers or manufacturers who weren’t under lockdown. Concentrations of supply chains, Norberg warns, in fact pose a greater risk of disruption than diversified ones, due to their total reliance on a smaller number of suppliers–having all their eggs in one basket. Domestically produced goods were often more likely to see shortages than imported ones; recall that it was international trade that alleviated the United States’ baby formula shortage when policymakers lifted import restrictions in response to the crisis.

The book defends capitalism from charges that it simply represents theft and exploitation, pointing out that it in fact embodies the opposite of those things: enrichment and freedom of choice. Replacing markets with a system of more centralized government control concentrates decision-making power in the hands of a small elite.

Substituting the collective wisdom produced by billions of people with the preferences of a few bureaucrats whose own money isn’t on the line tends to spell disaster. Norberg cites numerous examples including Quaero, the stillborn dream of a government-backed search engine from 2005. Quaero was intended to outcompete Google. Despite the best efforts of numerous European politicians and bureaucrats, and despite the French and German governments wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on the project, Quaero collapsed within a year. Its implosion demonstrates what happens, again and again, when decision makers are divorced from the reality of market signals and financial consequences.

With abundant data and memorable examples, Norberg shows the historical ignorance of the new vogue for anticapitalism. He unmasks it as nothing new at all, but something wizened and old that has reared its ugly head again. Tariffs, industrial policy, repatriation, and price-setting have repeatedly failed. Will policymakers on the left and right alike heed Norberg’s warning, or will humanity relearn the lesson the hard way?

The Communist Manifesto ends with the words, “The Communists … openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!” Instead of a call for violent revolution, The Capitalist Manifesto ends with a plea for the peaceful preservation of the system of global capitalism endangered by unwise policies: “We pro-capitalists of the world have nothing to lose but our chains, tariff barriers, building regulations and confiscatory taxes. We have a world to win.”

Blog Post | Science & Technology

Joe Biden Kicked Off the Encryption Wars

The Crypto Wars, Part - 1

This article was originally published on Pessimists Archive.

In 1991 Joe Biden introduced two bills containing anti-encryption language to prevent private emails: the Comprehensive Counterterrorism Act & the Violent Crime Control Act. He had effectively declared war on math, but why?

Newsletter containing information about a government bill seeking access to encrypted information.

Encryption – once mainly used by government – had increasingly become appealing to consumers with the rise of personal computers and then the internet. The prospect of democratized access to encryption worried governments and law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, an agency the Electronic Frontier Foundation claimed had persuaded Biden to attack encryption.

ℹ︎ In the early 1990s encryption was still treated as a munition and subject to export controls, software companies had to sell different versions overseas.

Newsletter highlighting a bill introduced by Joseph Biden when he was a senator.

While Biden’s bills didn’t become law, his attempt to prohibit email encryption gave programmer Phil Zimmerman the motivation to finish and release his open source encryption project ‘Pretty Good Privacy’ (PGP.) PGP would spread rapidly throughout the early internet – including across boarders – making it much hard to prohibit.

In 1993 a Federal Grand Jury opened an investigation into exports of cryptography software with regards to PGP and Phil Zimmerman, who later admitted “I was quite guilty.” Zimmerman’s emails were – ironically – subpoenaed, and he faced possible jail-time for breaking export laws.

Phil Zimmerman, and newsletters about the grand jury investigation in  encryption software exports.

Meanwhile the Clinton Administration started pushing the NSA’s ‘Clipper Chip’ – a computer chip that would allow the government to break any and all encryption. The ultimate goal was to make the chip mandatory. While Biden didn’t comment on the Clipper Chipper at the time, he didn’t speak against it as some other Democrats did.

Newsletter about the "Clipper Chip"

Government snooping wasn’t the only concern raise about the Clipper Chip, if the encryption key was cracked or leaked, criminals would have free rein to cause havoc. This fear was proven out in 1994 when computer scientist Matt Blaze figured out how to break Clipper Chip encryption, and again in 1995 when a French student broke the weakened encryption Netscape were forced to ship its web browser with abroad.

Newsletter about a flaw found in computer clipper chip.

The Government investigation into PGP would hang over the head of Zimmerman for 3 years until 1996 – when the US government announced they didn’t plan to prosecute him. The same year the ‘Clipper Chip’ would be declared defunct and abandoned by the US Government.

In the following years encryption export controls remained, stunting the growth of US software companies in foreign markets. Technology industry figures like Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Google’s Eric Schmidt lobbied the government to relax rules, which eventually happened in 1999.

Newsletter titled "Software executives lobby in D.C. for end to ban on encryption"

When terrorists struck on September 11th, 2001 encryption opponents would pin part-blame on the uncontrolled proliferation of strong encryption they warned against.

While the passing of the Patriot Act in response (a bill Joe Biden boasted he inspired) proved to cryptography proponents how important it was for encryption to be open and available to protect citizens from government over-reach. The following years saw renewed attacks on encryption in the name of fighting the war on terror.

Different newsletter with notes about threats to encryption.

It is worth keeping all this history in mind as we see governments – including the Biden administration – move to propose, pass (and force through) laws to in the name of stopping people using AI for nefarious ends. Especially when those same governments continue to try and undermine encryption.

Blog Post | Health & Medical Care

Freeing American Families

In their new paper, Vanessa Brown Calder and Chelsea Follett propose reforms to make family life easier and more affordable.

Fertility is on the decline in the United States and around the world. Although some commentators celebrate population declines for environmental or other reasons, others fear that below‐​replacement fertility will result in negative economic and social consequences. As a result, many countries are pursuing various policies intended to boost fertility rates, such as baby bonuses, cash benefits for families with kids, paid family leave, and universal childcare. In the United States, members of Congress in both parties favor greater federal intervention to boost fertility rates or to support families more generally.

However, such policies are costly and have limited effects on fertility. International evidence indicates that expensive efforts to subsidize childbearing have failed to raise countries’ fertility to replacement levels and sustain fertility rates there. They typically fail even to meet policymakers’ more modest fertility objectives. Recent estimates suggest that fertility initiatives in the United States would be similarly misguided, with some $250 billion in annual subsidies needed to achieve a modest increase of 0.2 extra children per woman.

Although policymakers should avoid implementing similar initiatives, many other reforms would make family life easier and more affordable. This study proposes reforms to labor laws, child safety policies, tax and trade policy, and health policies that affect birth and conception, in addition to education, housing, and safety policy changes that would reduce the cost of raising children. Evidence suggests that some of these reforms could boost fertility, for instance, by reducing work‐​life tradeoffs or other intensive parenting requirements. However, these reforms are also worthwhile as standalone measures that improve family life.

Read the full paper here.

Blog Post | Health & Medical Care

Modernization and the Loss of Japan’s Samurai Culture Benefited the Japanese People

Economic, technological, industrial, and other progress radically improved the life of the ordinary Japanese citizen.

Imagine you’re a farmer in Japan in 1850. You pay homage to your feudal lord, wear clothes of plain cotton, eat rice and fish, and are mostly preoccupied with surviving the occasional famine and outbreaks of disease. You likely have no education. Fifty years later, life has changed beyond recognition. Farmers now have an education, have fertilizer to farm with, have access to vaccination, and can use the telegraph and the postal service. They have more money to spend, more leisure time, and access to mass media.

The 2003 movie The Last Samurai portrays Japan during this period of modernization. The film laments the loss of traditional samurai culture amid rising Westernization. The film is inspired by the Satsuma Rebellion, a revolt from disaffected samurai amid the loss of their privileged position in society.

Longing for a privileged past is not unique to Japan; many in Europe romanticize the medieval era as one of knightly chivalry. However, such portrayals usually look at history through rose-tinted glasses. The “good old days” is a common fallacy, with facts becoming more distorted the further one looks back in history.

What really happened in the era of The Last Samurai?

The period takes places after the Meiji Restoration, showcasing the Westernization of Japan. Before this period, Japan was ruled by Tokugawa shogunate, a military dictatorship that had dominated the island for over 260 years. It imposed the foreign policy of Sakoku—that is, one of extreme isolationism. Aiming to reduce the spread of Christianity and cement the power of the shogun, the islands of Japan became closed to foreigners. No one was allowed to enter or leave Japan, and foreign trade was virtually nonexistent. (There was some trade allowed from the Dutch through the island of Kyushu, notably in porcelain.) This period was one of peace, which many in Japan welcomed after the Sengoku Jidai (a period of civil war) of the 1500s.

Conservatives in Japan welcomed this closing of the country to foreign influence. At the time, Japan was dominated by the samurai class. Samurai, while traditionally warriors, had moved in peacetime to become aristocratic bureaucrats at the service of their daimyo, a feudal lord. Samurai had a monopoly on military force and controlled most of education. Merchants were seen as a lower class, even lower than farmers. Feudalism, a system where a lord would rent out land in return for labor from the peasantry, had ended in parts of Europe around 1500. Whereas competition among European powers had created the emergence of a middle class, Japan had remained socially, technologically, and militarily stagnant from 1639 onwards.

As described by Mitsutomo Yuasa in his study The Scientific Revolution in Nineteenth Century Japan:

The traditional society (feudalism) before the Meiji Restoration, namely the age of Edo of Tokugawa Shogunate, was based on pre-Newtonian science and technology, and on pre-Newtonian attitudes towards the physical world.

In 1853, Japanese isolationism came to an end. With the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry demonstrating a textbook example of gunboat diplomacy, the United States forced an end to Japanese isolationism and the opening of Japanese ports to American trade. In the years that followed, Japan established diplomatic relations with the Western Great Powers and underwent a collapse of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate.

Japan then went through a period of rapid modernization, importing Western technology, ideas, and culture. Ian Inkster describes the impact:

By 1855, Western machinery and factory organization had been introduced at Nagasaki for the maintenance of warships, and a spurt of building began in 1860 under Dutch leadership. It was Englishmen who in 1867 constructed the first steam powered spinning plant, the Kagoshima Spinning Factory. . . . By 1882, the Osaka Spinning Company operated 16 mules, 10,500 spindles and was practically powered by steam. . . . From 1870 to 1872, 245 railway engineers arrived in Japan from Europe. . . . Telegraphic communication was also established by the British from 1871.

The industries that were revolutionized by foreign influence included the iron industry, mining, railways, electricity, civil engineering, medicine, administration, shipbuilding, porcelain, earthenware, glass, brewing, sugar, chemicals, gunpowder, and cement manufacture. Japan developed its staple industry and export product, silk manufacturing and spinning, under guidance from a Swedish engineer using Italian methods. The silk industry also employed a large amount of female labor in Japan, with more women in the industrial labor force in Japan than in any other country in Asia.

The development of technological innovations improved Japanese industry. Ryoshin Minami showed the growth in total horsepower between 1891 and 1937 was in the order of 13 percent annually. The figure below shows the growth rate of development of primary industries during the period between 1887 and 1920, as well as overall economic growth. In many of the years during that period, growth in private non-primary fixed capital was in the double digits.

By the 1890s, Japanese textiles dominated the home markets and competed successfully with British products in China and India. Japanese shippers were competing with European traders to carry these goods across Asia and even to Europe.

The Satsuma Rebellion occurred in 1877, as Japanese government restricted the ability to carry a katana (long sword) in public. Regardless of one’s thoughts on the right to bear arms, the reduction in the power of the samurai class was a win for ordinary Japanese people. Having access to modern medical techniques, transportation, and goods benefited the whole society, rather than just feudal elites. Indeed, many of the samurai were able to adapt to their new roles in a modern Japan, working in business or government. In the 1880s, 23 percent of prominent Japanese businessmen were from the samurai class. By the 1920s, the number had grown to 35 percent.

By 1925, universal manhood suffrage had been implemented, a stark contrast from the Tokugawa shogunate. The social structure had loosened, allowing societal advancement far more easily than in the feudal era. By 1897, 95 percent of citizens were receiving some form of formal education, in contrast to 3 percent in 1853. With a more educated population, Japan’s industrial sector grew significantly. Of course, the new system still had its problems, such as labor strikes and industrial unrest. However, Westernization brought far more economic freedom to the Japanese people. Attitudes to commerce changed. Merchants rose from being the lowest class to becoming a vital part of the burgeoning middle class.

In Japan, progress was seen in economics, science, technology, education, consumer goods, industry, and social mobility. Society and the traditional order had been uprooted, in an example of Schumpeterian “creative destruction.” The inflow of new ideas, of new ways of doing things, allowed people to become freer, wealthier, healthier, and better educated. The opening of Japan was fundamentally an opening to progress. By isolating itself, Japan fell behind the rest of the world. As it opened itself to competition, it was able to catch up, and in some cases, surpass other countries. And the ordinary citizen of Japan was better for it.