Say it ain't SO, Castro!!

I saw a news story from the AP today [link at the end of this post] that Cuba is considering eliminating government jobs (from the 97% of the workforce employed by the government) due to the lack of available work.  Wait, you mean that Socialism/Communism isn't perfect??  Do you think the current administration and the liberal wing of our political spectrum have heard about this??

So the big question is: When there is no incentive to excel, why try?  In my mind this question illuminates the the cornerstone of the fallacy of Socialism/Communism.  When your workforce throws up their hands and says "the State pretends to pay us, and we pretend to work," how far can that culture really go?

This isn't just about economics - it is incredibly larger than that.  We (humans) are just like every, other organism on the planet: we are Survival Machines.  Generally, the survival instinct is the most powerful driver of our behavior.  Democracy and Capitalism have driven human achievement farther and faster in the last 200-odd years because they directly relate to and leverage our survival instincts - the accumulation of personal resources (food, water, money, you name it), striving for achievement = safety (the smarter/stronger/more successful you are - the more secure you, your family and your offspring will be).  Bottom line: Democracy and Capitalism make our species stronger simply because they urge every individual to strive and to do more by, on the whole, directly rewarding that behavior.

The flip side: Socialism/Communism fail (over, and over, and over, and OVER AGAIN!) precisely because they are anti-competitive and they DIS-incentivize the strongest instinct we have (survival).  At the end of the day, if you don't have to expend any effort, how do you keep from becoming weak?  How do you keep from being out competed (and potentially naturally de-selected!) by others who DO have something to strive for?

The funny thing is, with the enormous amount of empirical evidence on the inefficiencies (and at this point downright silliness) of Socialism/Communism, and that they simply cannot deliver the social and cultural results that they promise - how can we explain the people who still promote them??  If these people aren't mentally deficient (and many of them are VERY smart), and they understand that they cannot deliver on the promises they are making - then we MUST assume that the political aspect is secondary to some other aspect for which these people ARE striving.

If you look clearly at the purveyors of Socialism and Communism (both past and present) it becomes obvious fairly quickly that these people simply end up serving their own survival instincts through the accumulation of personal resources (the best cars, the best dachas, etc.).  To sum it all up: the promoters of Socialism and Communism are simply using the grand ideological promises, and the aspirations of the people themselves, as vehicles for the accumulation of personal power, and the expression of their own bloated egos.  It's not about governance and freedom - it never was...

At the end of the day, every political system is perfect on the drawing board.  the real test, is the Real World.  Socialism and Communism fail as dismally and spectacularly as all of the other - with a single exception.  Regardless of your political persuasion, the combination of Democracy and Capitalism is measurably better than all of the other systems that humans have devised.  And the fact that you can look at them, and measure the success is all that matters.

Are Democracy and Capitalism perfect?  Not at all (I don't know about you, but I tend to leave perfection to the Almighty), and there is a lot of room to improve.  In my mind that's what we're here for: "to form a more perfect Union" each generation improving on the previous.  And while we will certainly make mistakes in the process, why on Earth would we go in the direction of things that we know DON'T WORK??  Why would we buy the Snake Oil of the current crop of Socialists and Communists if [I'm right and] it's only about their own personal power, and not at all about We the People?

We have work to do.  The question is what will make us WANT to do the work?  The opportunity to experience achievement and success?  Or simply working because someone else told us to work - someone who has NO Divine Right to fruits of our labor?

Here's the link to the original story: Cuba Mulling Government Job Cuts