Elsewhere (164)
Kevin D Williamson corrects the comedy economics of U.S. senator Bernie Sanders:
Prices in markets are not arbitrary — they are reflections of how real people actually value certain goods and services in the real world. Arbitrarily changing the dollar numbers attached to those preferences does not change the underlying reality any more than trimming Cleveland off a map of the United States actually makes Cleveland disappear… Free markets are a reflection of what people actually value at a particular time relative to the other things that they might also value. Real people simply want things that are different from what the planners want them to want, a predicament that can be solved only through violence and the threat of violence…
Markets adapt to political changes, and the hierarchy of values that distinguishes between an hour’s worth of warehouse management, an hour’s worth of composing poetry, an hour’s worth of brain surgery, and an hour’s worth of singing pop songs is not going to change because a politician says so, or because a group of politicians says so, or because 50 percent + 1 of the voters say so, or for any other reason. To think otherwise is the equivalent of flat-earth cosmology. In the long term, people’s needs and desires are what they are; in the short term, you can cause a great deal of chaos in the economy and you can give employers additional reasons to automate rote work. But you cannot make a fry-guy’s labour as valuable as a patent lawyer’s by simply passing a law.
Williams quotes the socialist Mr Sanders objecting to consumers having a wide choice of sports shoes and underarm deodorant, as if such things were a sign of wickedness, which reminded me of another socialist’s encounter with well-stocked shelves, in 1989, quoted here by Tim Blair:
[Russian president, Boris] Yeltsin, then 58, “roamed the aisles of Randall’s supermarket nodding his head in amazement.” He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.” “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” he said.
And here’s a Moscow supermarket circa 1990, filmed by Rick Suddeth. As you can see, the egalitarian retail experience is leaving shoppers happier and more morally elevated:
Entirely unrelated and posted for no reason whatsoever, here’s a queue outside a gloriously collective state liquor store.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.
“We are lucky, Boris. In U.S., government doesn’t give the people anything to eat at all.” I got your elsewhere right here
And here’s a Moscow supermarket circa 1990
Holy crap. Where would Laurie “full communism” Penny buy her hair dye?
Tea is now racist, apparently.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/steerpike/2015/05/the-guardian-dumps-british-tea/
Holy crap.
Even now, the footage is still a little shocking.
Where would Laurie “full communism” Penny buy her hair dye?
Quite. Though I suspect Laurie’s “full communism” is always the communism that exists only in her head, where all things are possible and The Glorious Theory™ is unsullied by mere reality.
One for you, David.
So. Much. Guardian.
One for you, David.
Heh. May your towels never lose their fluffiness, even after many washes.
And here’s a Moscow supermarket circa 1990
I don’t like the look of that meat that everyone’s smelling and putting back.
I don’t like the look of that meat that everyone’s smelling and putting back.
It’s very nearly funny, in a grim kind of way. It’s practically League of Gentlemen territory.
I suppose what’s jarring is the thought that, rather than admit defeat and abandon their ruinous ideology, the Marxoid overclass chose to pursue it in the face of its consequences and total dysfunction, for decades. Almost like an act of bloody-minded spite against their own population. With the result that generations of immiserated people were left looking at empty shelves in squalid supermarkets, poking at the occasional lump of unappealing grey meat.
One for your psychodrama tag.
https://twitter.com/hashtag/NUSBlack15?src=hash
One for your psychodrama tag.
I can no longer tell the difference between ludicrous parodies and ludicrous earnestness.
When will people realize that “the market,” i.e. prices set by the desires of the participants, is nothing more than a measurement? Ranting about its “unfairness” is like complaining about the unfairness of the speed of light or the distance between New York and London or the circumference of the moon. Marxists wish to ignore those measurements and the results were obvious. It was like trying to build a house without using a tape measure or level.
But the circumference of the moon is unfair. Look at the poor thing, overshadowed for so much of its existence by the much larger Earth. And the Earth gets a capital letter. We need a government that will do something about it.
Socialists are petulant children whose bodies got big but the rest of them didn’t. So they remain petulant children who are magnetically drawn to government, the teaching profession, MSM, Unions of any sort and of course welfare. All while claiming life isn’t fair and they are owed.
Until they are identified and limited to where they can work we will continue have more and more problems with no solutions.
But then, if government solves the problems … we won’t need them anymore. Like those millions whose livelihoods involve charities that never achieve their goals, but need more money to keep trying.
Diane Abbott’s Paradise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHgU6Llk-lo
A tenner, David. Thank you.
A tenner, David. Thank you.
May dust never settle on your hard-to-reach surfaces.
I can no longer tell the difference between ludicrous parodies and ludicrous earnestness.
Tim Blair’s Boris link was via Iowahawk, who posted it after running into a bit of ludicrous earnestness, here and here.
I can no longer tell the difference between ludicrous parodies and ludicrous earnestness.
Isn’t that the definition of Poe’s Law?
I suppose what’s jarring is the thought that, rather than admit defeat and abandon their ruinous ideology, the Marxoid overclass chose to pursue it in the face of its consequences and total dysfunction, for decades. Almost like an act of bloody-minded spite against their own population.
Eeeehhhn, No, not jarring at all actually.
Basically, once one gets one’s hooks into a system, can start harvesting, and does, then the declared responsibility of everyone underneath is to remain underneath and remain being the harvest. And the declared franchise of those harvesting is that they are to continue harvesting, at any and all cost.
… the socialist Mr Sanders objecting to consumers having a wide choice of sports shoes and underarm deodorant …
Of course, because the socialists know there will be widespread deprivation once they take power, so they want you to become accustomed to that. They also do this by complaining about “consumerism” and the like.
“The socialists used to claim that when their system took over, everyone would have shoes. When they discovered the truth, they declared that it was preferable to go barefoot.”
— Ayn Rand
the govt should set up competing supermarkets, so the privately-owned one’s [sic] will conduct business properly.
It’s often funny when people have so many opinions, held adamantly, righteously, and almost none of them correspond with observable reality. And then you realise that these people have completed their education, often at great expense, with no functional knowledge of how an economy works.
In other news, Alan Rusbridger is apparently leaving the Guardian “on an optimistic note,” with “a round of farewell parties.” Peter Preston, who gushes a little too desperately, is careful to make no mention of the paper’s recent lay-offs, or its massive annual losses and ever-shrinking circulation – its sales falling more than any other “quality” paper and now somewhere around 160,000 – or the GMG’s ongoing failure to find a viable online commercial model, or the prolonged crisis of its sister paper, the Observer, which still teeters on the brink of bankruptcy.
Yes, well done, Alan.
Ranting about the unfairness of the speed of light, you say?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1076200/posts
Thankfully, the courage of feminism isn’t limited to battling the laws of physics. They’re also brave enough to say stuff on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/604708337033355264
“To be publicly feminist or politically today is to face sustained harassment and psychological warfare” said the professional writer.
Oh, and if you want to spend hours staring in appalled disbelief at a catastrophic trainwreck of shameless scrounging, victimhood signalling and misplaced entitlement, your Twitter hashtag du jour is: #GiveWomenYourMoney
To be publicly feminist or politically [sic] today is to face sustained harassment and psychological warfare
Says the woman who, during her time as an Occupier, delighted in the obstruction and physical harassment of random strangers, and who, during the London riots, thrilled to the smashing of other people’s windows. And note that in Laurie’s mind, being ‘political’ means being leftwing.
From #GiveWomenYourMoney
Women are cut out of BILLIONS in tech wealth that is built on our emotional labor online. Community. Activism. Content.
I admit that I am only semi-literate in SJW speak, but what in the world is “emotional labor” and how the hell would it make BILLIONS in tech wealth ?
I’m not super sure I’ve ever actually seen the bottom of a supermarket chest freezer. It’s usually too full of food.
Actually, you’d only ever see a shop like that in the filthy decadent west if it was going out of business. Otherwise someone would have restocked the shelves, thrown away the gone-off meat, cleared away the cardboard boxes; those huge open spaces would be used for something; the checkout operator would’ve bothered to actually count how many bags of khlav kalash the customer was buying.
It’s almost exactly what you’d expect to see if the profit motive was removed from consideration. Which it was. Stating the obvious, but, well, blimey – it’s quite shocking to actually see it, and think that that’s what they were all like in Russia, for decades.
#GiveWomenYourMoney. I do that at strip joints and most days in my marriage.
…during her time as an Occupier, delighted in the obstruction and physical harassment of random strangers, and who, during the London riots, thrilled to the smashing of other people’s windows
“One gains the impression that the frustrated derive as much satisfaction–if not more–from the means a mass movement uses as from the ends it advocates. The delight of the frustrated in chaos and in the downfall of the fortunate and properous does not spring from an ecstatic awareness that they are clearing the ground for a heavenly city. In their fanatical cry of “all or nothing at all” the second alternative echoes perhaps a more ardent wish than the first.”
The True Believer
Eric Hoffer
1951
And note that in Laurie’s mind, being ‘political’ means being leftwing.
As you’ve said many times, David, it’s the vanity that stands out.
it’s the vanity that stands out.
And it’s a very common assumption among our self-imagined betters. Let’s not forget Bidisha, the Guardian’s self-described “non-white angry political female,” who disdains those who don’t share her question-begging fixations as “apolitical people who simply don’t get what the big issue is and are too lazy and complacent to fight the status quo.” You see, the people who disagree with Bidisha, or who find her unconvincing, or simply ludicrous, they “have no politics.” No arguments or facts can possibly exist that counter Bidisha’s own assumptions, and no-one could possibly have considered the issue at hand and arrived at a different conclusion. Such is her modesty.
But a self-flattering ideology propagated by narcissists will tend to attract people inclined to self-flattery.
I’ve heard several stories of the profound culture shock that people from Eastern Europe suffered when the Iron Curtain came down and they were finally free to travel to the West. One that sticks in my mind is how some friends took a freshly-liberated Romanian to their local branch of Sainsbury’s or whatever. The thing that made the biggest impression was an entire aisle devoted entirely to pet food, being abundantly stocked with cans of food that would have gladly been eaten by people in Bucharest. On a more recent note, I have been able to compare supermarkets in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan ones look more like the Soviet one above and the Costa Rican ones look like Waitrose. Venezuela, of course, it the current poster child for maybe-this-time-it’ll-work lunacy, where the country with more oil than any other cannot maintain an adequate supply of material with which to wipe one’s arse. This is not a coincidence. Like they say: Socialism—where people wait in lines for food; Capitalism—where food waits in lines for people.
what in the world is “emotional labor”
It’s what other, less enlightened souls call “dicking about on social media.”
In other words, they want to be paid for using Twitter.
The unfairness of the speed of light
As any fule kno, Alan Sokal set a new world record in handing arses to pretentious Lefty academics by dealing with that very subject in a masterpiece of a parody.
Unfortunately, judging by the amount of turgid and meaningless po-mo waffle that is still being churned out by academia he may as well not have bothered.
the country with more oil than any other cannot maintain an adequate supply of material with which to wipe one’s arse
Reminds me of an anti-communist poster I saw once: “Often the shops ran out of toilet paper. Luckily there wasn’t any food either.”
“Students: express yourself on the theme of austerity and protest. We want to see your placards, poetry and art.”
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/may/27/students-express-yourself-on-the-theme-of-austerity-and-protest?
‘And here’s a Moscow supermarket circa 1990’.
I did Russian GCSE at Sixth form, taking the opportunity presented by a part-time tutor at the school. I got two trips to Russia out of it, including an exchange visit.
Three girls came over to the UK in October 1992, one of whom stayed with us. Anastasia expressed an interest in visiting a local supermarket, so we took her to Tesco’s. When we left she was almost in tears, shaking her head at what she had seen, and comparing it to what she had grown up with (and what she was still experiencing).
There was also a local carpet dealer that was offering small samples of their produce for 20p, so Anastasia bought a load of them to take back to Moscow. When I visited her in February 1993 they were adorning the floor of the dining room in the family flat.
Meeting Anastasia made me realise how damn lucky I was to be born on the Western side of the old Iron Curtain. It also made me immune to the far-left bollocks that is still being spouted about the wonders of Communism and the iniquities (and inevitable demise) of capitalism.
We want to see your placards, poetry and art.
Hm. Student poems about protesting against austerity. And yet the Guardian readership continues to shrink. It’s a head-scratcher.
Friends of mime and colleagues who spent their childhoods in Warsaw Pact countries still, a whole quarter of a century later, cannot understand why pampered brats of the west romanticise communist societies and idolise the likes of Che Guevera. They actually ask if we even bothered studying history.
Oh and small point, but I rather preferred the appellation The Mighty Bidisha as used on previous occasions.
Oh good Jesus, please thank my wayward fingers for allowing you to guffaw at the thought of connoisseurs of the art of mime using their art to express their scepticism about communism.
Banner:
It gives a whole new meaning to the “I’m trapped inside a box” routine.
“Meeting Anastasia made me realise how damn lucky I was to be born on the Western side of the old Iron Curtain.”
I have had arguments with leftists who insisted that the Soviet Union did the West a favor by building the Berlin Wall, because otherwise the West would have been overrun with refugees. The syphilitic dogs didn’t want to consider that the West readily absorbed the refugees that made it across before the Wall went up and could have continued to do so indefinitely. They would have been good workers and, as soldiers, enthusiastic killers of commies.
Uh-oh, I forgot to close those italics. Let’s see if this does it. Sorry, David.
Try again.
In other words, they want to be paid for using Twitter.
I’d assumed you were exaggerating for comic effect. I was wrong.
Try again.
Nice catch.
Actually, Venezuela has finally solved the toilet paper crisis with some innovative economic policies. By inflating their economy rapidly, the value of a 1 bolivar note is now lower than that of 1 square of standard toilet paper. Of course the size and shininess may be less than ideal, and the cheap ink can leave embarrassing marks, but the solution is in their hands !
‘I fail to get the joke’ Laurie Penny, New Statesman : http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/05/we-have-distinguish-between-outrage-and-justified-rage-marginalised
Laurie’s latest blathering is being chewed over here.
That Soviet supermarket looks a lot like Lidl’s, actually.
Possibly even smells the same, if they’re unlucky.