I can understand people back in the mid-1920s claiming that "bourgeois democracy" was a sham, greatly inferior to "democratic centralism."
What I cannot understand is how anyone who knows anything about the power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, or about Stalin's dictatorship can still believe that campaigns-and-elections are pointless or even not necessary.
Was it Abbe Sieyes who said, after the Restoration, that the Bourbons had learned nothing and forgotten nothing--learned nothing about politics or government from the Revolution, and forgotten none of the injuries to their people during the Revolution?
Brad DeLong --
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- "Now 'in the long run' this [way of summarizing the quantity theory of money] is probably true.... But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. **In the long run** we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again."
--J.M. Keynes -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- J. Bradford De Long; Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley; Co-Editor, Journal of Economic Perspectives. Dept. of Economics, U.C. Berkeley, #3880 Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 (510) 643-4027; (925) 283-2709 phones (510) 642-6615; (925) 283-3897 faxes http://econ161.berkeley.edu/ <delong at econ.berkeley.edu>