Kenneth Campbell wrote:
>Respectfully, David, your response is itself a "cop out." Yugo... you be
>nice now.
>
>Just this eve, I was spending some time talking about history with a
>friend. She brought out a book with a variety of graphs. The most
>salient one, in this regard (thread), was the shift of population from
>"agricultural workers" to "industrial workers." The graph only measure
>100 years, starting from 1860.
>
>The curves that the UK and US generated with meagre slopes in that time
>frame. Those units had made that "relocation" much earlier. Japan's
>curve started around the 1880s. The USSR was around 1930. (There were
>others, like Turkey, with similar steep relocation curves.)
>
>I mentioned to her, in talking about that, that the one thing that I
>found the most knee-jerk and unreflective about the right is that they
>make unsophisticated comparisons, usually assuming from some mythical
>"ground zero" that the US and Russia started on a level playing field
>and only socialism crippled Russia.
>
>I think you may have done something similar by offering the Yugo as a
>piece of evidence ("case closed!") when it is really just a propaganda
>symbol of something about the historical reality of two very different
>cultures and economic developments.
Was the Yugo made in Russia? Was Yugoslavia part of Russia? I was never good at
geography.
The argument was made that a socialist economy would put more emphasis on
transportation safety than a capitalist economy. Seems plausible. Silly me, I though
one way to test that thesis was to examine and compare the actual products produced by
the respective systems. You don't like the Yugo as an example? Fine. How about West
and East Germany? Can't complain about different historical development. What was
safer on average, a Mercedes/BMW/VW, or a Trabant?
I stand by the position that if you refuse to consider historical evidence and insist
on speculating about what could happen in utopia: cop out.
David Shemano
