In this Wall Street Journal op ed, former chess world champion and Russian opposition leader Gary Kasparov analogizes Vladimir Putin's Russia to The Godfather:
Mr. Putin's government is unique in history. This Kremlin is part oligarchy, with a small, tightly connected gang of wealthy rulers. It is partly a feudal system, broken down into semi-autonomous fiefdoms in which payments are collected from the serfs, who have no rights. Over this there is a democratic coat of paint, just thick enough to gain entry into the G-8 and keep the oligarchy's money safe in Western banks.
But if you really wish to understand the Putin regime in depth, I can recommend some reading. . . [G]o directly to the fiction department and take home everything you can find by Mario Puzo. If you are in a real hurry to become an expert on the Russian government, you may prefer the DVD section, where you can find Mr. Puzo's works on film. "The Godfather" trilogy is a good place to start, but do not leave out "The Last Don," "Omerta" and "The Sicilian."
The web of betrayals, the secrecy, the blurred lines between what is business, what is government, and what is criminal--it's all there in Mr. Puzo's books. A historian looks at the Kremlin today and sees elements of Mussolini's "corporate state," Latin American juntas and Mexico's pseudo-democratic PRI machine. A Puzo fan sees the Putin government more accurately: the strict hierarchy, the extortion, the intimidation, the code of secrecy and, above all, the mandate to keep the revenue flowing. In other words, a mafia.
I don't fully agree with Kasparov's assessment. Putin's regime is not "unique in history." To the contrary, predatory regimes that combine corruption, repression, and skullduggery are all too common in the developing world. As I have noted in an earlier post, one of the main themes of The Godfather is that all government has a great deal in common with organized crime. Russia's government is more Mafia-like than those of the West, but not more so than many other regimes elsewhere in the world. And as Kasparov would probably agree, even a Mafia state is still a major improvement over the mass murdering totalitarianism of communism.
The tragedy of Russia is not that its current government is uniquely bad. It is that the country had the human and material resources to do so much better, as the post-communist states of Eastern Europe and the Baltics have done. The tragedy for the world is that this particular Mafia state has large quantities of oil, gas, and nuclear weapons.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Why People Get Much Worse Government than they Deserve:
- Gary Kasparov on Putin's Russia and the Godfather:
As for Russian "human" resources, I tend to disagree with you. As Burke had it, they're getting precisely the kind of government they deserve. Given the sorry state of Russian human resources, one wonders whether there will be a Russia in 2107...at least, Russia as we've come to know it, a gigantic, multinational nation of continental proportions. Or will it just become another big Slavic country that is perpetually stepping on its own feet?
Commodities come, commodities go. Russia will need more than oil and gas to survive.
Oh really, The situation in Darfur, the Rwandan genocide, Idi Amin's rule, the Taliban or Nazi Germany are better than communism. Give me a freaking break.
The Russian Federation's constitution limits a president to two terms; and Putin's second term expires in 2008. Legitimate democratic leaders like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton step down when their terms end; Mafiosi don't.
Odds anyone?
I strongly suspect that the sorts of "human resources" that Somin was refering to were that, at the end of communism, Russia had, in many ways, one of the best education systems in the world, with very, very high literacy (higher than the US), world-class teaching in mathematics and some aspects of science (generally better in theoretical than applied, for various reasons), and so on. The top levels of the university system was also excellent in many fields, producing many world-class researchers, again especially in math, physics, etc. Several things have happened to squander this resource. First, the education system has been largely defunded, making it extremely hard to keep it going- schools are in terrible states, teacher pay is too low to live on, leading to corruption, it is extremely difficult to hire and retain new teachers, and so on. The education system is also shot through with corruption, bringing along all the problems that go with that. Government funding for research is also down, making it unattractive for researchers to remain in Russia. The problems have lead to a huge number of the most talented and ambitious Russians fleeing the country since the end of communism. Additionally, attempts to form civil society groups and non-governmental power sources have been seriously set by regulations designed to do exactly that. Pockets of excellence remain in the education system, of course. A math degree from MGU still counts for a lot, I'd guess, and the average graduate from the English Language department at the provincial university where I worked for a while spoke much better English than any single Russian major I've ever met in the US, including graduates of ivy league schools. But, the sense in which there was great human capital in Russia in 1991, and that this has been squandered (starting, of course, with Yeltsin and the band of criminals he worked with) should be clear.
But, this simply can't be true! Communism is incapable of producing anything competent or good. State run schools, especially in communist countries, will produce nothing but mediocre or worse students as there is simply no incentive to excel. Without the profit motive, schools, in fact everything, will produce shoddy products.
I would argue that the Soviet Union under Stalin, the People's Republic of China under Mao (particularly the period immediately following the Civil War AND during the Cultural Revolution), the Vietnam in the first years after the Communist takeover in the South and most assuredly, Cambodia under Pol Pot were as bad as the regimes you named. I do, however, love the historial revisionism in some that wants to pretend that mass murder did not occur in any of the regimes I named.
Since you appear to be the major apologist for all things Communist on this blog--I will agree that the regimes you named were awful if you will do the same regarding the ones I named.
I'm sorry, but show me one post of mine where I defended any of the regimes you listed (except for Vietnam, there is no evidence that they were responsible for the kind of mass murder that would put them in the league of Stalin or Mao--and in fact they were the ones who ousted the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia). And I don't think agreeing with Churchill (Winston not Ward) as to who was a worse despot, Hitler or Stalin, quite counts as defending Stalin's Russia.
As for being an apologist for communism. If thinking that libertarianism is as ridiculous an ideology as Marxism and that the kind of society that the more hardcore libertarian posters on this site (including Ilya) advocate could lead to the kind of excesses that occurred in the darkest days of Stalin's Russia or Mao's China, then I guess I am guilty as charged.
- J. F. Thomas
Okay, I'll bite. I would like to hear a reasoned argument as to why you would think this would happen-- or even be possible.
This is precisely what libertarian government sets out to prevent.
1) I think you have confused anarchy and libertarianism.
2) You seem to have missed the fact that most of the high-up corrupt officials and businessmen now in power in Russia were the same corrupt evil men under communism, only they more power and control then.
And how precisely would libertarian government prevent this. In a pure libertarian government, regulation of the economy would be almost non-existent. As an recent example in this country, Bernie Ebbers would have been free to continue with his pyramid scheme (which got amazingly far even with all the regulatory structure we had in place) potentially all the telecom infrastructure of this country. When the pyramid had collapsed--and of course all pyramid schemes eventually do--the effects would have been even more devastating than they were.
As for the development of a mafia type state. Even with regulation, the Mafia in this country was able to infiltrate a large number of legitimate businesses. Without strict regulation, criminal enterprises will of course be able to use legitimate business for a illegitimate means.
I don't see how a libertarian government, with its fierce disavowal of regulation and the defense of individual rights over all other considerations is going to prevent the corruption of large organizations. Unless of course you eliminate the concept of the corporation in your libertarian state, which I have never heard advocated. It is strange that the corporation is the one collective (and least democratic) organization that libertarians seem hell-bent on defending.
Would you mind explaining how Worldcom was a pyramid scheme?
And libertarians oppose collective organizations? Even voluntary ones? Where did you get that idea? (I don't know much about libertarianism myself, so maybe I am wrong about this.)
Worldcom was a classic pyramid scheme. The company expanded through a series of ever larger leveraged buyouts. At the same time, through the use of creative accounting, they used the borrowed money and other accounting tricks to make it appear as though they were making huge profits on their supposedly "core" business, telecommunications, when in fact they were losing money. When the merger with Sprint failed, the ever higher stock prices and borrowed money that were being used to fraudulently create phantom profits dried up and the pyramid collapsed. Bernie Ebbers justifiably got sixty-five years in jail. He deserved much more.
I worked for Sprint during the time. Worldcom's shenanigans not only damaged Worldcom it also seriously damaged AT&T and Sprint. Both companies were driven to compete with Worldcom and trying to compete on both price and show the same profits. But since Worldcom's profits and prices were based on crooked bookkeeping, fair competition was impossible. AT&T and Sprint nearly bankrupted themselves trying to compete with a company that was cheating (and the public got used to long distance rates that are simply unreasonably low).
And extraordinarily smart (genius). I wonder if the WSJ piece is all his own work or he had help in putting it together. No, not ghost-written, but a little help. So my OT question:
How strong is the correlation between strength as a chess player and IQ (G)? Do musical abilities, e.g., a great concert pianist or violinist, correlate better with IQ than chess abilities do? Do poker playing abilities correlate as strongly/weakly?
There have been idiot savants who could do multiplication of large numbers as quickly as a machine, but had well below average. Have there ever been idiot savants whose island of brilliance was chess playing, or is chess an altogether different sort of mental challenge?
How many of the very greatest chess players have been much more than just chess players, as Kasparov so clearly is? If Sherlock Holmes' notion of how the brain works and the limits of its storage capacity were correct, it would be hard to imagine how there would be room for anything beyond the number of chess games Kasparov's brain holds.
Although you are undoubtedly correct that Russia's government has plenty of analogues throughout the world, there is one fundamental difference. Other governments that are similarly corrupt and repressive do not enjoy membershipinthe G8, do not have Country X-NATO consultative council, do not have a right of veto in the UN (China may be the exception, though I would argue that China is just as repressive, but not as corrupt), etc. It is the extraordinary amount of power couple with the West's lack of fortitude to confront Putin's Russia that makes Putin's regime unique.
Kasparov also has a deep knowledge of computer science, which pretty symbiotic with mathematics. A very ordered, logical mind and decent human being - more important then anything.
China not as corrupt? You've got to be joking.
If the world's greatest concert pianists and the world's greatest chess players were tested, should we bet on one group or the other to come out with exceptionally high IQ scores? Are both of those endeavors strongly correlated with mathematical abilities, e.g., would those in both groups be expected to do exceptionally well on the math SATs? The verbal SATs?
I won't engage in a tit-for-tat over this as various numbers are not universally accepted. But regarding South Vietnam, primarily with a focus upon post-April 1975 but also with a couple notes concerning the post-colonial period c. 1954-1975, the following:
+ 65,000 South Vietnamese were executed by the North Vietnamese.
+ 250,000 South Vietnamese died in Soviet styled gulags and Maoist styled "reeducation" camps. (For a contrasting number, James Taranto recently took note of a 2001 investigation by the Orange County Register which came up with a number of 165,000 killed as a result of 1,000,000 being placed in those reeducation camps.)
+ A million South Vietnamese boat people, tens of thousands of which died at sea.
+ Many hundreds to many thousands of suicides among the South Vietnamese leadership in the wake of April 1975.
+ There were 400,000+ South Vietnamese civilians killed by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars during the period c. 1954 - 1975. (E.g., the Ho Chi Minh Trail was originally created as a supply line and in order that propagandists, assassins and terrorists could infiltrate from the North into the South, coercing local, indigenous South Vietnamese populations into ideological compliance.)
+ More generally, Uncle Ho was not the simple nationalist as protrayed by the Western Left, he was a thoroughgoing ideologue and practitioner of Leninist/Stalinist styled totalitarian programs, from instilling a cult of personality to eliminating contenders for nationalist leadership via assassinations and intra-party purges. As Michael Lind notes, in the Kremlin on the evening of Feb. 14, 1950, three men toasted one another in a banquet hall: Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh. They weren't simply college drinking buddies, they were there to discuss politics.
But yes, Uncle Ho's North Vietnam, later Vietnam, was less lethal than Pol Pot's Cambodia. File under: Damning with Faint Praise.
Numbers cited are out of Lewis Sorley's A Better War, who sources his numbers more specifically in footnotes. And of course all those numbers reflect killed only, not lives variously destroyed but short of being killed.
To be sure, China is corrupt. But it seems to me (and I admit I am not very well informed about China's domestic affairs) that the Chinese government is fighting corruption, while the Russian government is promoting it.
I would also point out that Transparency International assigns China a corruption index (the higher the number the less corruption) of 3.3 (ranking it 70th in the world). Russia, on the other hand gets a grade of 2.5 and a rank of 121. So it seems that my view is at least somewhat vindicated.
In a pure libertarian society, economic regulation (e.g. price controls, antitrust laws, regulation of monopolies, regulation of mergers, etc. would not exist.
However, property rights would be strictly enforced - much more so than we see today. Fraud would still be illegal, contracts would be strictly enforced.
I don't know enough about the Worldcom scheming to know what property rights his deception may have infringed or which contracts he may have violated-- but if he did, then he would have been prosecuted just the same in a libertarian society.
However, the fraudulent companies that have swindled regular folk out of millions of dollars are bad but they aren't nearly the threat that government-aided corruption is. You could never have a truly mafia-style government, let alone a totalitarian one, without the aid of government. A bunch of private businesses trying to swindle regular folk, even if they band together, can't get far without help from Uncle Sam (Or Uncle Joe or Uncle Ho).
Nobody is saying that the Vietnam War was not a vicious, bloody war where many civilians were killed and countless atrocities were committed. But to claim that the Vietnamese regime carried out mass killings, before or after the conquest of the South, that makes it comparable to the worst excesses of Stalin or Mao is to fall into the trap of simply claiming that all communist governments are and were equally evil and by definition, unable to gain or hold power without resorting to mass murder.
If you are going to blame the Vietnamese government for the deaths of the boat people at sea, then you might as well condemn capitalism for all the deaths in Africa and India that came with the end of colonialism (the excepted figure is that 500,000 people died in violence at the partition of India in 1947).
Gee, I just gave you the example of WorldCom, which actively had to hide its activities from the government. Yet you claim such activities would not be possible without the help of the government. How on earth did the government aid Worldcom in its crime and what would crime would Ebbers have committed if the regulatory scheme had not existed? Presumably, under a libertarian regime there would be no such thing as accounting rules, everything would be buyer beware.
That is just the type of nonsense thinking that typifies libertarians and Marxists. Marxists believes humans are perfectable through the elimination of property rights and libertarians believe that property rights are the solution to all problems.
Worldcom's conduct, even in a completely regulation free world would amount only to bilking people out of their money. That does not equal a totalitarian state, as Worldcom, no matter how much money it swindles would have no power of arrest, prosecution, etc.
I don't deny that Putin's regime has more power than other similar governments, and indeed noted in the last line of my post. But Kasparov's argument focused on the regime's internal structure, not on its influence in world politics. And that is what I focused on in the post as well.
No, I very specifically didn't say that. Go back and read what I said.
I said that if what they did violated property rights or violated contract (as in, it was theft) then it would have also been prosecuted in a libertarian society. And then I said that whether or not your have such fraud and theft in a society, without the aid of government you'll never have a mafia-style state let alone totalitarianism.
You have not convinced me that any kind of non-libertarian regulation (economic regulation as opposed to enforcement of contract and laws against theft) would reduce the number of swindles, and I make the case that government aid to swindlers is what leads to mafia-like states.
Well you obviously ignore the lessons of all the corporate scandals of the last few years. And you don't make the case for anything. You just make an unsupported statement of (libertarian) faith.
As for mafia-like states, it is kind of disingenuous to say that you can't have a mafia-like state without the aid of the state. Obviously if the state is corrupted by organized crime, it will be very difficult to tell which came first, the corruption of the state by the criminals or the criminalization of the state. But you don't even have to leave this country to find examples where local and state governments were corrupted by organized crime. Heck, the Mafia in this country grew so powerful partly because they were able to intimidate and blackmail J. Edgar Hoover.
But of course the totalitarian regime of Ho Chi Minh & Co. was responsible for the "boat people." (Again, an innocuous and benign sounding term for such a murderous, repressive situation which forced them to flee. Likely, someone among the western press came up with the term.) If it wasn't, then you're either suggesting those refugees should have contented themselves with living in that repressive and murderous regime or you're suggesting something which is not at all clear.
Further, you're confusing what is comparable with what is not comparable.
Capitalism is the economic engine and the economic way of ordering things, in general and variously, in the west. By contrast, the social/political systems adopted in the west are, again generally and variously, in line with classical liberal conceptions of governance and representative democracies.
By contrast, the economic way of ordering things in Stalinist and Maoist regimes was the central state mandated economy. By contrast, the broader social/political system adopted in those regimes was totalitarian/authoritarian.
So, it's appropriate to compare capitalism with central state economic mechanisms and it's appropriate to compare classical liberal forms of governance with totalitarian forms. But it's not appropriate to compare capitalism (an economic ordering) with totalitarian forms of social/political governance. It's true that western media often do this, especially during the Cold War, but it's an inapt comparison; such would be similar to comparing the U.S.'s political system with Sweden's fiscal and monetary policies and their broader economic system. (I understand there is some overlap and potential for ambiguity, but am speaking in general terms.)
That's more than a mere quibble, especially so since the western press kowtowed and complied with the Left for so long, throughout the Cold War, in using the same inapt comparison the Left forwarded, among other terms as well. It's also not a quibble because even today, vis-a-vis the Iraq and broader situation, the MSM is often doing much the same thing.
Old habits die hard.
Russia is an example of what your libertarian paradise will quickly devolve into.
And later:
And how precisely would libertarian government prevent this. In a pure libertarian government, regulation of the economy would be almost non-existent. As an recent example in this country, Bernie Ebbers would have been free to continue with his pyramid scheme (which got amazingly far even with all the regulatory structure we had in place) potentially all the telecom infrastructure of this country. When the pyramid had collapsed--and of course all pyramid schemes eventually do--the effects would have been even more devastating than they were.
This is incorrect. Under a libertarian regime some business regulation would pass to civil law - shareholder suits and the like - since in this case it is shareholders and to some extent competitors essentially being defrauded, misled, etc. The criminal laws regarding fraud and corruption would still be on the books, although the prosecution might be handled privately.
I can't stress this enough - most libertarians do not want to do away with all civil and criminal laws. This is a hobby horse that many people who do not understand libertariamism or want to mislead people about libertarianism use. The goal of libertarianism isn't lawlessness, just moving as many functions of the government as possible into the private sector while keeping people free from force and fraud and protecting their rights as much as possible.
As for the development of a mafia type state. Even with regulation, the Mafia in this country was able to infiltrate a large number of legitimate businesses. Without strict regulation, criminal enterprises will of course be able to use legitimate business for a illegitimate means.
This is a concern. It could be handled with security firms unaffiliated with criminal groups.
Heck, the Mafia in this country grew so powerful partly because they were able to intimidate and blackmail J. Edgar Hoover.
I haven't heard of this. I have heard the rumors about cross-dressing and speculation about his orientation, but I haven't heard about the blackmail. Do you have any links to sources on this?
According to Wikipedia:
That, of course, has not stopped the History Channel from doing a grand and highly speculative one hour special.
Ha! We privatized that too!
There's a reason we don't see real world examples of libertarian governments and it's much the same reason that we don't see flying whales or stable and non-radioactive transuranium elements. In the real world some things simply don't work and so tend not to come into existence or to speedily decay into something very different if by chance they do.
There's a reason we don't see real world examples of libertarian governments and it's much the same reason that we don't see flying whales or stable and non-radioactive transuranium elements. In the real world some things simply don't work and so tend not to come into existence or to speedily decay into something very different if by chance they do.
That doesn't follow. I think its irrationally pessimistic to assume that a libertarian government couldn't form or last for long. After all if tremendously coercive governments like communist and socialist ones - with the tremendous amount of force needed and the waste that force entails - can last for 50+ years surely a much more efficient and prosperity creating libertarian one could last for at least as long. But as we are seeing it could prove very difficult to set up.