Once a Symbol of Power, Farming Now an Economic Drag in China
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The New York Times sees the solution as privatization. Very American. But if privatization happens in China it will be like in Russia: A few will be given the property of all(as the property is in theory collective of all). Russians are so angry about privatization there.
I am not such a fan of the American system, USA is very rich but also terribly poor. Living in the USA you see poorer people than anywhere else in a western society. And poverty is rising enormously.
Ironically, the original American system was giving property in small chunks to anyone who took it from the Indians.
This differentiated it from systems like Latin America, in which property was given to a very few people. This has been a total disaster for them.
Also, US of A territory is as big as China for 5 times less people.
There are ways in between. You can make cooperatives that aggregate rights(which is what Chinese have, not property) of small farmers into big territories.
I was born in Spain and some cooperatives work very well there because they are well organized by the same workers. It is very common to share tractors or distribution channels between a group of farmers.
A Russian acquaintance of mine once said "I don't have a big company; I'm no criminal". Just reflect on that: You cannot be a successful businessman in Russia without using illegal means. A legally successful businessman in Russia is a logical impossibility.
WHAT ??? Have you been to central/south america?
No matter how bad it is in the US right now, Bolivia/Haiti/Brazil/Venezuela/Paraguay/... has people that is in worst situations by all standards you can think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world#Modern_definitio...
> USA is very rich but also terribly poor. Living in the USA you see poorer people than anywhere else in a western society. And poverty is rising enormously.
This is a very interesting perspective; did you ever travel to rural parts of China? I have never been to china, but my Chinese lab mate says that the best translation for Chinese outside of the cities is "peasant" not farmer. One good example of the way these people are treated is the lack of public education for people in these areas. In the US some schools are much better than others, but every child is guaranteed a public education, and has the opportunity to train for a reasonable job.
Similarly I have friends from Iraq and Nepal who are happy here. Pretty much everyone in the US has heat, running water, a modern dwelling... I know very little about Europe and other western societies though, so perhaps it is much worse here than in some places.
China isn't what would normally be considered a western society; I assume they were talking about the developed world.
Much of the developed world does have substantially better social safety nets that the US, and lower rates of income inequality, though probably not due to the distribution of ownership of farmland.
Can you point me to your sources on this, I'm quite curious?
As for income inequality, the statistics are pretty telling.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/08/news/economy/global_income_i...
But it is the goal of liberalism to have strong social safety nets and equalize pay to all. The US has a different culture with different values... tending towards the "conservative" and with great trust in market forces.
"Obamacare" is seen as Socialism and half the population seems to hate it. But Obamacare only establishes rules for the free market to operate under... standardizing health care plans across insurance companies. There is no state-sponsored health care from the law, and yet people are still worried about socialism.
Obamacare is closer to Credit Card reform, in that it forced all credit card companies in the US to standardize upon the "Annual Percentage Rate" / APR so that everyone can comparison shop across credit cards. With Obamacare, all insurance companies have to offer similar plans (bronze, silver, gold, platinum), and they must cover certain provisions (contraceptives make the controversy here). So now when you see a "Bronze" plan from say... Aetna Health Insurance, you know it is similar to "Bronze" plans from Kaiser Permanente.
As far as the "Socialism" goes... US has had Medicare / Medicaid for nearly 80 years now. The "socialist" part of our health care system has existed for a very long time, but no Republican seems to want to attack it.
But inside the US, any new laws upon the market is seen as a "Market Distortion" and is criticized as "Socialism". Because most American's don't even know the meaning of that word. The absurdity in the "Net Neutrality" argument is more proof of the free market sheeple ignoring important issues and placing their trust in the free market instead.
Medicare/Medicaid are, like the student loan programs with college tuition, at least partially responsible for driving up the costs of healthcare in the US.
We've backed ourselves into a very difficult corner, and getting out of it isn't going to be easy, and it won't be popular.
Obamacare is closer to car-insurance, with the caveat
that even if you don't want a car you still have to buy
the insurance. THAT is what has most of the nay-sayers
agitated.
http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/oreilly/2014/07/24/bill-oreill...
Bill O'Reilly, who is frankly a good conservative voice, clearly thinks that "Obamacare is Socialism"... that it is about income redistribution.
Which tells us a few things: Bill O'Reilly hasn't read Obamacare, and he also doesn't understand what "Socialism" means. Otherwise, he'd be attacking Medicaid.
And Bill O'Reilly is actually an overall intelligent guy. I do enjoy listening to him a lot of the time. His opinion and views are generally very reflective of conservatives. So when Bill O'Reilly gets it wrong, it reflects poorly upon conservatives as a whole.
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Without getting into the Obamacare debate, you have to admit that a fairly large portion of the conservative crowd doesn't even understand what "Socialism" is. That's what I'm trying to say.
Obamacare is a massive example. The individual mandate has absolutely nothing to do with socialism or income redistribution, but is instead a provision to eradicate "pre-existing conditions" clauses in insurance companies.
Socialism is... like the US Postal Office. The Government ownership of a service that the Free Market could take over. (ie: FedEx / UPS)
Socialism is a social and economic system characterised
by social ownership of the means of production and
co-operative management of the economy, as well as a
political theory and movement that aims at the
establishment of such a system.
Socialism: Medicaid, Postal Office. When the government owns and manages a core service, that is Socialism.
Individual Mandate: Its a regulation, legally its a tax. The government is forcing you to do something, like drive under 65mph or making leaded gasoline illegal to buy. Or making it illegal for you to smoke in certain areas.
In fact, when I hear people call the Individual Mandate "socialist", it tells me two things: 1. You don't know the meaning of socialism 2. You probably don't understand the Individual Mandate.
Maybe you don't like the Individual mandate. That is fine. I don't really like it either and preferred Mitt Romney's solution. It probably was possible to fix the Health Care system without resorting to the Individual Mandate... but to call it "socialism" is wrong.
How about you figure out how to criticize policy without resorting to words you don't even understand.
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Let me help you. I criticize the individual mandate as overhanded, excessive, burdensome regulation, difficult to enforce. Empowering to the IRS. An unnecessary tax on citizens. An abuse of the Commerce Clause.
You know, facts, real reasons why the Individual Mandate sucks. But to call it "socialism" is pure ignorance.
Of course this is all state regulated (and this is US-centric, but so is Obamacare), so it can work differently in different places.
Health insurance nominally protects you, though some make the argument that it protects society as a whole from any individual burdening the system.
In the car insurance case you can forgo the car and thereby forgo purchasing car insurance, but with the ACA you can't forgo health insurance.
I'll have to agree with you on this one. To me it always sounds for a split second that whoever compares it with socialism is joking, and then I'm reminded that Americans say this in all seriousness. I wonder, what's the Republican and Tea Party members views on public education? Are they against it? 100% free market education? (serious question)
When I use the term "socalism" or "socialist" while discussing a political topic, it doesn't mean I'm comparing it to, or saying it is Socialism. To me, like I would assume most other anarcho-capitalists and libertarians, socialism isn't a binary. It's a grey-scale towards socialism. So, while most would not say that public schooling or a social safety-net are "socialist" or meaning we have "Socialism", the anarcho-capitalists and libertarians would just be implying that this is one of the many things on the way to socialism.
Perhaps we're wrong, and these extras and government-projects, etc won't lead to a full socialist form of government. But every single time one of those things is enacted, it's a step in the direction of a less free society. A step in less voluntary and peaceful ways of solving problems. We say peaceful and voluntary because by our definition, government is neither of those (but that's a whole long discussion just by itself).
*edit: missing word.
I've talked to _real_ socialists, and I do believe myself to be ultimately a free market capitalist kind of guy... at least by default.
But unfortunately, the world isn't a simple place, and there are simple mathematical proofs in Game Theory that prove pure liassez-faire capitalism to be wrong. The free market fails in cases as simple as "The Stag Hunt", so it is ultimately the point of a capitalist government to intervene in any of the documented cases where the Free Market fails to work.
No anarcho-capitalist has ever given me a clear answer on how Cell Phones would work today if it weren't for government regulation enforcing the 2.4GHz spectrum for Wi-Fi, and also enforcing the licensing of spectrum. I like the fact that it is illegal to disturb other people's cell phones.
The Licensing of Spectrum is neither socialist, nor pure anarcho-capitalist. It is a mechanism Americans invented to avoid a market-failure cornercase. Without licensing of spectrum, competitors would create cell phones that disturbed cell phones from other companies. Without government intervention, it is impossible to create property-rights and "ownership of spectrum" that leads to today's cell phones.
And all anarcho-capitalists I know of also understand that a consistent viewpoint of "property rights" need to exist for any form of captialism to work. If you're like other anarcho-capitalists I've talked to, you'll go on about Dispute resolution organization and how they're different from judges.
The main problem is that if two Dispute resolution organization have different viewpoints on property rights (ie: one likes the concept of licensed spectrum and another one doesn't), then property rights ultimately fail to exist at all, and then capitalism breaks down entirely.
The socialist approach to solving the problem is to have the Government own all cell phone companies. This is _very_ distinct from the American solution, where the Federal Government created the concept of "spectrum" that different companies can then buy and sell to each other.
So seeing the world as "Socialist vs Anarcho-capitalist" is extremely naiive, and absolutely frustrating to those who like to discuss policy matters. The world is not binary, there are many different solutions to a single problem. Calling everything you disagree with as "socialism" simplifies arguments into a "them vs us" situation and stigmatizes debate.
Honest, learn to call _real_ socialist things as socialist. Not every single government intervention is a socialist plot.
People like to pretend Europe is only Germany, Britain, France, Norway etc.
Moldova, Czech, Belarus, Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia, Latvia, Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria and so on. These are countries that are dramatically poorer than the US. What does the amazing free education there get you? A $300 or $400 per month minimum wage.
An amazing social safety net where you're among the poorest 50% on earth? I don't get how that's something to celebrate.
I've known plenty of poor people, having grown up in dirt poor Appalachia, and growing up poor myself. I've never known a single truly poor person that couldn't get free healthcare from the government.
Much of the developed world
I live in China, and I wonder which rural areas you are talking about. From my knowledge, primary and secondary school (known as 9-year compulsory education) attendance is virtually 100% everywhere with two notable exceptions, namely extremely mountainous areas and the autonomous regions. In extremely mountainous areas transportation is almost impossible and schools tend to be underfunded; the problem with autonomous regions is beyond my knowledge.
To back my claim with statistics, a report from the Ministry of Education (http://www.moe.edu.cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/moe..., the report is in Chinese) estimated the net primary school enrollment ratio at 99.71%. A more dated UNESCO report from 2000 (http://www.unesco.org/education/wef/countryreports/china/rap...) estimated the net primary school enrollment ratio at 98.5% in the year 1998.
I'm not sure how that's even remotely a valid comparison or point of reference to the standard for American poor.
Just draw a thick line between lower and middle income countries (e.g. India is upper lower income).
Incidentally, Guizhou, Yunnan, Jiangxi, Sichuan, etc... are fairly mountainous and autonomous (based on ethnicity), so education is a problem as xiaq said. But education in China up to the 9th grade is north of 95%, most people aren't illiterate and can at least use their smart phones (which even poor farmers have now) for texting their friends.
American poor as a qualification is a much higher standard than in countries like Spain or Portugal or Greece to name three. Half of Europe is extremely impoverished compared to the US standard.
The average poor American is better off than the average poor person in those countries, both in terms of what they possess materially, what social welfare they get, and how large their dwelling is.
I've seen a lot of policy claims about China go back and forth over the decades. Plainly, China's Communist government has never been as careful about individual rights or civil liberties as Taiwan's government was even while it was still a one-party dictatorship. (I lived in Taiwan both before and after the mostly peaceful transition to multiparty democratic government with full protection of individual rights and civil liberties there, and China is nowhere near as far along that path as Taiwan already was in the 1970s.) Rural people in China need economically productive employment to continue to advance in prosperity. The country still needs food production, even if it ends up with many fewer farmers, as all other countries do along the path to economic development. Private land rights with actual legally protected sales of those rights can eventually rationalize how land is used for farming, and who lives where. (Many of my uncles and quite a few of my cousins in the United States in 2014 are STILL farmers, generations after when most Americans have stopped being farmers.) The key issue is whether the Communist Party's overwhelming appetite for corruption will allow the needed economic transformation to happen or not.
Communism has nothing to do with the scale things are operated at.
There are two basic problems there: Too many people, and that it is hard for farmers to provide sufficient security to get loans to finance industrialisation because they don't own any land. With the latter, you could get collectives arranging to aggregate their land and e.g. share machinery.
Basically, they've socialised the land ownership, but not socialised the farming operation, and as a result they have a mismatch where they've made their farmers a high financing risk. Either socialising parts of the farming operation, or privatising the property would both likely be better than their current alternative for profitability of farms.
But the issue of too many people exacerbates the problem: More efficient farms have the potential to be more profitable because you can farm a larger area with fewer people. If the number of people remain constant, you don't have the same incentive, since you are paying for the labor anyway, and probably won't be able to afford it either. So ultimately whatever they do, they will want to encourage a reduction in the number of farmers.
The problem is that the government would not like to have to deal with a growing unemployment problem in the cities by driving people to leave their plots, and they also would not enjoy the social unrest it could potentially cause to force the issue. Hence their slow reforms.
(It's also very indicative about the ideology of the Chinese government that it has not made any moves towards socialising the farming; e.g. they could have increased the land rent but provided farmers access to collectively owned farm machinery as part of it, or even explicitly required farmers to arrange cooperatives and only rent out bigger parcels of land - instead they are opting for means of making farming rights a commodity subject to market forces)
To note, China did delve into farm operation collectivization under Mao, but this was almost completely undone by Deng.