Re: Re: Re: RE: Castro on US elections.

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Brad wrote:
> But the idea of a gerontocrat who hopes to rule his country nearly
> absolutely for 50 years giving lessons in political institution design is
> funny, isn't it?

I'll respect Brad's criticism of Castro's dictatorship when he shows that
he's in favor of democracy, by critiquing the dictatorship of capital in
the US and the dictatorship of the IMF and similar institutions in less
privileged places -- and when he realizes that political democracy is
extremely difficult in a relatively poor country like Cuba that's
constantly under attack from the north (and has had to ally with the Soviet
autocrats in the past). The kind of democracy Brad favors seems to be the
kind where the choice is fixed ahead of time (the Fool or the Knave), where
the issues at stake are limited to a narrow range (since almost all crucial
economic decisions are left to business, banks, and their Fed), and where
anyone who tries to break up the fixed game (Nader) is denounced as
something close to a traitor and threatened with bodily harm.

Brad doesn't seem to have the time to provide substantive arguments (logic,
data, etc.) in order to convince pen-l of his position but instead simply
decides to make nasty comments about Castro -- even though the results are
extremely predictable: an intelligent person such as Brad could have known
exactly the kind of responses his flak would invoke (however, the reference
to Singapore was somewhat surprising). I guess that he feels that he
doesn't have to convince us because the orthodoxy put forth by the New York
TIMES, TIME magazine, and similar establishmentarian outlets is True by
definition. The  pen-l people are simply crazy (like the New York TIMES'
pundits' descriptions of Nader) because we won't join the neo-liberal
crusade. If we're a bunch of loons, why bother talking to us, Brad?

BTW, Hayek's critique of central planning cuts both ways. Not only does it
say that an economy can't be planned effectively by a small centralized
planning agency, but it also says that the idea of a country being ruled
"nearly absolutely" is absurd. The totalitarianism theory (where a small
elite runs society absolutely) bites the dust.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine