Thanks to Lorant Szabo on Facebook for pointing me to this 2014 video on YouTube, Socialism Betrayed – Roger Keeran & Thomas Kenny.

Very interesting video. While I might quibble with a few of the assumptions, it does present some novel viewpoints worth considering. The views are probably most novel to those of us who have grown up with the western media dominating our view of the world.

Being the skeptic (realist) that I am, I don’t believe than any ism, capitalism nor socialism, has all the answers. I think that was readily admitted by the two speakers in the video. So the question is how do we navigate in the real world to put together a society that works best in the real world. I don’t think the two speakers would disagree with that being the overriding question.

I won’t try to reproduce the conversation that ensued on Facebook, but I will mention a clarification about the comment on what I thought the authors would agree to.

The authors suggest that worker motivation is an inherent problem of Socialism that has to be addressed. Their discussion about Cuba and its jobs guarantee has interesting implications for proponents of the job guarantee in this country. I am not saying the job guarantee is without merit. I am just saying that it has to be implemented with eyes wide open to the problems that might arise, and would need to be solved.

Bloomberg has the article Why Workers Are Losing to Capitalists.

The IMF economists also predict that global financial integration should help alleviate the pressure on labor in poor countries. If American, European, Japanese and Taiwanese companies are able to invest in a developing country like China, the inflow of foreign money will boost incomes for local workers and compete down the profits of local capital owners.

What utter hogwash. You might expect the IMF to come to this conclusion. They are the organization that suggests that austerity is the way for a country to overcome economic decline.

The issue about labor losing power in the target countries of USA offshoring has an explanation. Some of the worst capitalistic tendencies that exist in the USA follow the offshoring to these target countries. There are now billionaires in China. With so much supposed government control of the economy in China, how did it come to pass that there are now billionaires with private fortunes in China? Russia faces the same problem.

A lot has to do with the tilting of the rules and regulations and tax policy to favor the accumulation and concentration of great wealth. In Russia, a lot of the government enterprises were sold off at fire-sale prices to people who took these properties and squeezed billions of dollars of profits out of them

What would have happened if these properties had not been given away, but had remained in state ownership, but competed in world markets with an eye toward being competitive? What if the profits from these operations had been spread among all citizens of the country instead of being concentrated in the hands of a few? Are there any studies being done to ask this sort of question? Are there any studies on what was changed to enable the concentration of wealth? How about studies on what needs to be changed to prevent over concentrations of wealth? The concentration of wealth was reined in in the middle part of the 20th century and undermined in the latter half of the 20th century and ongoing in the 21st. Maybe we need some effort to adapt these changes to the current situation.