Hunger, Oppression or Freedom?
It is very difficult for freedom loving people with full stomachs to understand why the North Koreans do not revolt?
The assumption is if you are normal person, you love your freedom. Right?
No. Not so. Your first priority HAS to be HUNGER. If you are hungry, you cannot think of anything else. It is easy to fast, if you know where your next meal is going to come from. Hunger is when you do not know from where your next meal will come!
So writers like Ayn Rand who spoke about capitalism did not suffer or write about hunger. Socialism believed that hunger, education, and health are the real issues. A trip to any of the socialist countries (ex socialist ??) shows how the basic needs were met by them. Socialism is a good start, achieve 100% literacy then embrace capitalism seems to be the answer!!
No I do not want to write about Capitalism vs Socialism, but just wondering. Let us take AR’s ideas to a larger level – should all the capitalists in the world realise that the population of North Korea is a great market? So it is in their INTEREST to free those people from the oppressive regime? They could be a good market at the bottom of the pyramid – but food, clothing, schools, ..they would be looking for all of that, right?
Well read on…Economist says
http://www.economist.com/node/21529063
Dr Khan
Subra
I don’t know where you read your history, but history says that the greatest famine in HUMAN HISTORY with the largest number of starvation deaths was caused by callous policies like the ” Great leap forward” by Mao’s China
Another great famine was caused by Stalin deliberately in Ukraine with almost 7 million death. It also has a name – Holodomor.
There is a famine currently going on in North Korea. In the last famine in the 90s, thousands of children have been reported to have been perished, due to hunger.
All the above and countless other examples have/had Socialism as their governing ideology.
Ravi
Hunger comes from poverty.
Poverty can’t be eradicated with Government doles. The poor can come out of poverty by having access to Capital, which comes through savings.
“Poverty and hunger can only be eradicated when a government is in place that protects private property for all of its citizens, and allows free enterprise and free trade.”
Dr Mohammed Ali Khan
Subra is again contradicting himself. He says that we need Socialism to meet the people’s basic needs. ( Who gets to decide what exactly is a basic need, he does not say – We can even call a cell phone connection a basic need ). Then he says that there is hunger in North Korea, as if North Korea is a free- market economy and the people there are being deliberately starved by the ” Greedy short-sighted non-passionate capitalist businessmen” as Subra calls them.
There is no natural reasons like drought or floods for starvation in North Korea, it’s a man-made famine. It is surrounded by prosperous countries. It’s twin South Korea is rolling in wealth. Just across the border China is booming, across the sea is one of the richest countries in the world. It’s starving because the governing ideology there is a Korean version of Communism( which is a more ruthless version of Socialism) It’s a deeply anti-capitalist regime. Just growing some tomatoes and bartering them for potatoes grown by your neighbor can send you to a prison camp for “Speculation ” and ” Capitalist tendencies” . Even so people routinely open up informal markets where they trade goods and such places are frequently busted by the police.
pravin
“So writers like Ayn Rand who spoke about capitalism did not suffer or write about hunger”
is this correct?.she escaped russian conditions,including hunger and opression i assume when she emigrated. i might be wrong.i dont know rand’s history very well.
but to presume that capitalism starts with heavy machines and big companies finding ‘markets to sell’ their wares is incorrect.
markets exist when people are left alone to sell each other stuff and services.and ofcourse sound money.if govt keeps printing money,people will not save and no capital will be available for investment -which is the root of progress.
Dr Mohammed Ali Khan
Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.
Frederic Bastiat
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Benjamin Franklin
Dr Mohammed Ali Khan
@ Pravin
Subra says ” So writers like Ayn Rand who spoke about capitalism did not suffer or write about hunger”..
I think that he should have checked atleast wikipedia before writing this.
According to wikipedia..
“She was the eldest of the three daughters of Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum and Anna Borisovna Rosenbaum, largely non-observant Jews.”
Merely being a Jew in pre-1917 Russia would have been a handicap on several levels. Jews were discriminated against, subject to arbitrary violence and were mass-murdered in frequent state sponsored riot-massacres called “Pogroms”.
“Rand’s family life was disrupted by the rise of the Bolshevik party under Vladimir Lenin. Her father’s pharmacy was confiscated by the Bolsheviks, and the family fled to the Crimea, which was initially under the control of the White Army during the Russian Civil War. She later recalled that while in high school she determined that she was an atheist and that she valued reason above any other human attribute. After graduating from high school in the Crimea, at sixteen Rand returned with her family to Petrograd (the new name for Saint Petersburg), where they faced desperate conditions, on occasion nearly starving”
So, she was not exactly living in the lap of luxury with no touch with the real world outside her lab/academic world, as Subra seems to imply.
She went through great suffering and uncertainty( as did a great many unfortunate Russian people at those tumultuous times) especially during her childhood and adolescence.Implying that she was some sort of cocooned academic with no touch to real world suffering and hunger is disingenuous.