Hanarchy Montanarchy wrote:Why are starvation and famine only moral problems when we can blame the commies.
If you starve on your own merit in a free market... well at least some socialist monster didn't try to subsidize you.
Also, you folks should try reading the whole post. I don't think command economies are a good idea and said as much. I don't think wealth destruction is limited to them though.
This is important to note. It does not matter what kind of economy one has if becomes corrupt. I do support socialism, but one could make an argument both for and against it. The same it true for any economic system.
However, the supporters of any economic model insist on believing in its wonderfulness; that one cannot fail the system, the system can only be failed.
I say it does not matter what system we are talking about because some will find a way to sabotage it for their own benefit even if it means others suffer and die.
As for communist economic system causing hunger, in the Soviet Union it was the deliberate policy by Joseph Stalin to starve bothersome classes of people. Millions killed by starvation rather than the bullet. More convenient for him. Mao Zedong was just as evil, and many of his underlings also did not mind assisting him, although I don't think the mass starvation was a deliberate genocide as in Stalin's case. Genocide by policy, or cruel indifference, still genocide.
As for the capitalistic free markets, those are used just as much to commit genocide by starvation. Notable examples by the British include, the Irish Potato Famine, the Indian famines of 1770, 1838, 1873, 1876, 1896, 1899, and 1943. Several of these famines involved over 10 million dead, all except one were over a million.
As was also true in the Soviet Union, and Red China,
In each case food was being shipped out of the famine area. In some cases there would have been no death, just severe hunger, in all cases the suffering would have been greatly reduced. However, in all cases the people who did the dying were the poorest. The British, and yes some Indian rulers, had the money, the government refused to buy, regulate, or block shipments of the grain. So people died for the free market, and capitialism. Or in the case of 1943 at least, pure good old fashioned corruption.
An earlier Irish famine, and some Indian famines were successfully solved or at least reduced greatly by the British. However, it depended on the views of who ever was in charge at the time. People that were human fought the shortages, and those motherf****** who thought the system could only be failed, and not failed, blamed the victims for their dying. Reading Lord Trevelyan's complaints about how tired he was working on the Irish Potato Famine after he did nothing to fix is...interesting.
Note this note a incomplete list of famines under British rule, nor of the other European, Latin American, or Asian powers in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. And some famines could not be completely prevented. But most were made worse for financial reasons.
