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H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

newstatesman.com

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Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#131

Post by AnimalMuppet »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #123
rat87 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In general, people who bring themselves to power tend to be extremely competent. Traditional classical Greek "tyrants" had a deserved reputation for solid, effective rule, but things would quickly fall apart after they died. Millions of famine deaths under Stalin are attributed to some mix of malice and incompetence. I am not saying that he was totally incompetent. He helped usher in a ton of industrialization that…

This is a fairly general issue if you're looking at "competence". Without disagreeing with anything you said, let me ask the following: Assume you're going to collectivize agriculture. How well do you think that will go? What's the best achievable outcome?

"Competence" might mean that you don't collectivize agriculture...

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#132

Post by mh_yam »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #122
mh_yam wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bush was a very intelligent man contrary to what many believe. http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/

Your link has a certain amount of spin going on. Bush was a pretty intelligent man; his SAT scores are known. He got a 1206, the equivalent of a 1276 post-1995 but before the inclusion of the writing test. Certainly (well, I hope) not smarter than the average student at Stanford Business School, but, notably, smarter than Kerry was. I think the more interesting questions here are, "how much power does the US presiden…

Seeing what Obama is doing, it's pretty similar.

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#133

Post by dang »

amirmc wrote: post #112
dang wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bolsheviks cultivated celebrity visitors from the Western left. It wouldn't have worked to shoot them. (Edit: Originally this comment had a moderation bit in it as well, but someone rightly pointed out to me that it isn't helpful to wear the moderator hat and make a regular-user comment in the same post. So I've edited that out. I considered restricting myself to only making moderator comments, but (a) that's nev…

Two thoughts 1. Has anyone suggested making yourself a new moderator account? eg dang_mod for all mod-related comments. It might ease the mental burden for the reader (at the cost of increased mental burden and user-switching for you - so maybe not worth it). 2. As a simpler variant of the above, why not make two separate comments? I expect readers are capable of telling apart your user comment from the moderation if…

1. That would be easy to do, but it feels wrong to me. Not sure I can articulate why, other than that it's not the way HN has always worked.

2 is more or less what's what I'm going to do from now on.

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#134

Post by dang »

davidw wrote: post #119
dang wrote: post #46

All: this article is on-topic for one reason: it is historically interesting. Predictable ideological tangents are not interesting. Please keep them out of this thread and off HN altogether. If it isn't clear whether a comment counts as a predictable ideological tangent, err on the side of assuming it does. I know it sounds arbitrary to declare what's "interesting", but (a) the term has developed a specialized meanin…

So what do you think about the resulting discussion?

Poor.

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#135

Post by delackner »

mh_yam wrote: post #120
marincounty wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? I guess George Bush was extremely competent? I have found people who bring themselves to power had a rich father. (This will get deleted. Whenever I talk about the lack of Horatio Alger's, especially in the last 30 years--moderators get angry.)

Bush was a very intelligent man contrary to what many believe. http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/

Thank you for highlighting a difficult point! The most instructive item for me was seeing a comparison of video of Bush in his run for the Texas governorship, showing his sharp mind. In such context though, the dissonance. erwee. his stated political objectives and his true violent objectives is disheartening.

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#136

Post by dang »

philwelch wrote: post #102
dang wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This counts as an ideological tangent, and therefore off-topic. There is no meaningful path from this article to Austrian economics. Edit: Perhaps this needs more explanation. "Stalin -> communism -> capitalism -> Austrians" is not a meaningful path, because there's nothing specific about it, nothing to tie it to this particular story. It merely uses the story as a launching pad to jump straight into a perennial ideo…

If you're serious about not letting every story dissolve into the same tedious arguments we've seen for the past few years, I would be so happy.

Definitely serious, and interested in your suggestions re how.

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#137

Post by ArkyBeagle »

The thing that is most interesting is that neither of them seem to have ever heard of "consumer surplus". This is two of the most ... "educated" men of the time; now the concept is much more widely understood. Say what you will of Milton Friedman, he'd done a lot to at least get people familiar with these sorts of concepts.

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#138

Post by ArkyBeagle »

fludlight wrote: post #88
dang wrote: post #46

All: this article is on-topic for one reason: it is historically interesting. Predictable ideological tangents are not interesting. Please keep them out of this thread and off HN altogether. If it isn't clear whether a comment counts as a predictable ideological tangent, err on the side of assuming it does. I know it sounds arbitrary to declare what's "interesting", but (a) the term has developed a specialized meanin…

Since HN seems to have an interest in Soviet history, I would recommend Darkness at Noon by Koestler and Khrushchev: The Years in Power by Medvedev.

I can't recommend all of Solzhenitsyn enough. You'll be forgiven if you don't make it all the way through "1918"... I, frankly, didn't. Perhaps someday. also it never cease to astound me how deeply Boris Pasternak drew his picture of the thing. The David Lean film is almost better than the book, but the book is amazing.

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#139

Post by delackner »

dang wrote: post #49
vijayboyapati wrote: post #34

The interview is interesting from the perspective of economic history because it reveals the prevailing thinking of the era; namely that capitalism leads to "anarchy" in production. What Stalin and others did not appreciate is that the free market produces a "hidden order", which was understood by many 18th and 19th century economists. Another major error of the era was the belief that central planning of an economy…

This counts as an ideological tangent, and therefore off-topic. There is no meaningful path from this article to Austrian economics. Edit: Perhaps this needs more explanation. "Stalin -> communism -> capitalism -> Austrians" is not a meaningful path, because there's nothing specific about it, nothing to tie it to this particular story. It merely uses the story as a launching pad to jump straight into a perennial ideo…

Oh man i hope you manage to continue this bold and positive direction in moderation! At times it seems I have to wade through an entire thread just to see one or two comments about the content and not about something vaguely related.

Worse, the constant reinforcement of this sense that comment threads will be full of random unrelated diatribes leads more people to post their own such comments. It is incredibly hard to take a stand against them because they are often well spoken and interesting in their own right.

Re: H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

#140

Post by ArkyBeagle »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #11
dominotw wrote: post #9

> But I have some experience in fighting for Socialism, and this experience tells me that if Roosevelt makes a real attempt to satisfy the interests of the proletarian class at the expense of the capitalist class, the latter will put another President in his place. The capitalists will say: Presidents come and Presidents go, but we go on for ever; if this or that President does not protect our interests, we shall fin…

But then Roosevelt was quite effective in putting the capitalists in their place for an entire generation, perhaps longer, until Nixon and later Reagan turn us to the right again.

But he wasn't, really. Government can't really do much to constrain capitalism. Most of what FDR did was wildly ineffective. Some of the weirdness in how corporate accounting works now go back to tax dodges then ( and since) . There were 90+% marginal rates; that's rather extreme.

Nixon presided over the end of the Bretton Woods Accord but that particular system was already worn out. Some credit the end of Bretton Woods with the rise of international super capitalism. It's debatable. Nixon... wasn't all that clued in - he started wage and price controls.

The stuff that FDR did was more like trying to coordinate things. Most of it didn't work. They did put large corporate entities into contracting big time, of course, because of the War.

Reagan? Didn't really do much but talk. He had tax increases advertised as tax cuts, but the rest was rhetoric. A lot of Reagan's spending was undoing damage done by Nixon to military budgets. Some of it - like Star Wars - was just kinda crazy. Bluff.

The PATCO strike was rather a one off union busting thing; it really wasn't part of a larger pattern. It's just the the large monolithic corporation was evolving out. With that went the ability of unions to bargain.

McMegan has some thoughts here: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/e023c820e0110130a0d758...

Agree, disagree - she's on the money as to the issues to my limited understanding.

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