>>> Brad De Long <delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU> 06/05/99 09:11AM >>>
*Snort* *Giggle* *Chortle*.
I had written:
>
>I no longer find it funny...
I withdraw my claim. It *is* funny--in a sick, perverted, demented, and despairing kind of way...
((((((((((((((((((((((
Chas.: Well, make up your mind.
((((((((((((((((((
Mao decides--throwing aside everything about economies of scale in industrial development that had been learned over the previous two centuries--that the people of China are to stop farming and make steel in their backyards. No one dares tell Mao that this policy is having a catastrophic effect on agricultural production. Thus when the local bureaucrats backed up by the PLA come to requisition the harvest, they take away so much of it to feed the cities that a very large number of people--perhaps between 8 and 80 million? we don't know in large part because the then-regime had no interest in permitting any contemporaneous documentation of what was going on--starve to death.
And in a bold act of staring the facts in the face, Mr. Burford categorizes this as a "weakness of a socialist state."
Surely it would be more appropriate to say something like my:
> Alas! The fact remains that Mao Zedong was (along with
> Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler) the head of one of the very,
> very few regimes that managed to kill more than thirty million
> people in this century. Mao's Great Leap Forward and the
> Cultural Revolution count as among the greatest human
> disasters of this century...
(((((((((((((((((((
Charles: But a news item has just been posted claiming that the current Clinton regime ( of which someone said you were a member) , through its control of the IMF , has managed to shove 200 million people into poverty by its neo-liberal economic policy, in the latest world recession alone. There is a good chance that 30 million of those people will die premature deaths. So, there is evidence that you should add your own regime to your list.
You don't do body counts on American regimes' very reckless policies resulting in mass poverty and thus premature deaths, or else you would have many more extremely reckless policies to label as killing millions.
Your crtiique of disasterous and deadly economic policies means you're in a glass house and throwing stones.
Charles Brown