Tuesday, August 26, 2014

SYSTEMS MATTER Part 6: A PRODUCTIVE NATION

Founder, Project C.U.R.E.
Author, The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist


In retrospect, the economic part of the Marxist/Leninist plan of total revolution in 1917 was pathetic . . . almost laughable. They knew nothing of economics or running a business, let alone a nation, or more ludicrous, the world. If you have been reading just these posted weekly articles over the past four years, you already know at least ten times more about economics and business than did Marx, Engles, Trotsky, and Lenin put together!

The communist coterie was so concerned with the total revolution and the smashing of all Russian systems that no serious thought at all was given to the basic systems of managing the economics of a nation. . What shall the dog that is chasing the car do with the car should he catch it?

The junta was desperately preoccupied with killing the czars and their families and grabbing the uncalculated wealth of the Czar’s golden egg. They just knew that if they could capture the treasure chest of the wealth that was stored somewhere, they could spend their time and creativity in distributing the booty and controlling everything and everybody forever. They never gave a worry about the question from whence cometh the golden egg? They figured that the golden egg was stored in the banks and they would own the banks. They just presumed that business would simply run itself as it always did, only they would own it and there would be no bourgeoisie involved. Obviously, the businesses were too big to just fail!

Karl Marx’s theory was that someday soon all proletariat workers around the world would angrily rise up en masse and kill the bourgeoisie bosses. They would get sick and tired of the bosses exploiting them because they were cheating every worker. The claim was that the bosses always kept the surplus value of a commodity that was created by the worker. That was theft.

That generalization was based on Marx’s misunderstanding of how the real world works. He touted that the value of a product should be determined only by the value of the labor that went into producing it. Only the laborer was entitled to receive the proceeds from the commodity or product produced, and there should be no such thing as surplus value for the bourgeoisie bosses to steal.

The conclusive answer for Marx was to let the proletariat own everything, and then it would not be necessary or possible for the rich bosses to get their hands in the middle of the process and steal the money rightly deserved by the workers. There would no longer be any expenses such as rents, costs of raw materials, utilities, or anything else, because the workers would own everything themselves, and everyone could keep and divide the entire value generated by all efforts. There would only be true value. There would be no such thing as surplus value.

Of course, it would never work. But with the frenzy, the emotion, and the very idea that all the people would be wealthy and all their wants supplied, they were moved to action. No one else would have anything more than what someone else personally possessed. That line of emotionally charged promises bought out the very souls and brains of the proletariat peasants. Because of their personal desire to receive something for nothing, and the hope that the government would take care of them from the cradle to the grave, they were convinced to pick up guns and kill those who would dare keep them from receiving their promised dream.

Neither Marx nor Lenin understood that it wasn’t just the hours of labor of the proletariat workers that determined the value of a commodity or product. Perhaps they did not wish to understand, if understanding limited the possibility of their dreams of total revolution coming true. The leader’s wild rhetoric implied that after the revolution the proletariat would be in total control of the new world. But the politburo never entertained another thought different from Marx’s own words that The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Vladimir Lenin would be that ruthless dictator at any cost. The resulting power and spoils would be his personally, if only the revolution could be successfully accomplished.

Even when it dawned on Lenin and the revolutionaries that there would be some management required after their successful and bloody revolution, Lenin calculated it to be no problem at all. They were the revolutionary leaders, and the politburo consisted of the elite thinkers when it came to all things concerned. Their intelligence would figure out the answers to such simple and bothersome matters as business and economics.

The all-wise comrades finally formulated a plan of economic management called the Gosplan. Gos was an abbreviation for the Russian word for government: thus, the Government Plan. Gosplan figured out the strategy. Gosten figured out and set prices. Gosnab decided the allocation of the supplies, and Gostude handled issues of wages and labor assignments. It seemed to be a right-tidy management package.

Gosplan was designed and written for a five year model. The plans never worked! They tried to modify them to one year. That never worked. The truth is that communism and resultant socialism has never figured it out.

Can you even imagine the egoism and arrogance necessary to believe that you personally, or even your appointed Gosplan group, could successfully coordinate such an assignment? The complexities of trillions of necessary decisions to be centrally made would be an administrative nightmare.. You could never get it right.

In the country of Armenia, I stood in a very large building that had been formerly used as a leather processing plant and a facility for manufacturing of shoes. The old Soviet Communist forces that had occupied the country and run the shoe operation had long since pulled out and returned to Russia. But some of the old workers had subsequently gone back into the old building and started up a leather processing plant and a shoe factory on a free market basis where they owned and operated the business.

Through my translator I engaged the successful owners in a long and revealing conversation. I wanted to know how the Gosplan functioned under the communists. They laughed aloud. It didn’t! They told me that a large number of people were assigned to the shoe manufacturing part of the operation. Some people were assigned to stamp a pattern on the leather, others cut out the leather pieces, others sewed the upper part of the shoes together, and others were in charge of stitching the bottom soles onto the uppers and pounding an appropriate heel on the shoe. Other people were assigned to dying the entire shoe, drying them and packaging them in large crates, which were shipped off to somewhere and stored in warehouses. Everyone had a quota to meet.

But the constant problem was that, more times than not, all the workers just sat around and sipped vodka. Something would break down in the leather curing and tanning operation and there would be no leather available for making shoes. Many times the leather operation would never receive the horse or cow hides because the butchering plants never had enough animals to kill and skin out.

They explained that the reason for the shortage of the animals was because they had miscalculated in the Gosplan how much hay and grain it was going to take to feed the animals, and even if the animals had produced babies, the offspring would die, which would affect the proper number of animals that were needed for the years to come. If they didn’t have enough feed for the animals, or the weather was not cooperating with the Gosplan, then everybody involved in the whole leather and shoe production could only sit and wait for someone to figure out how to revise the Gosplan.

No one really cared whether they produced the number of tons of shoes or the number of animal hides required, or for that matter, the amount of hay required each day to feed the animals. It wasn’t their fault or concern if someone down the line or up the line messed up. They received the same kind of housing, the same quality of clothing, the same allotment card for the same kind of bread and the same measured handful of vegetables whether there were any shoes produced or not.

One of the new entrepreneurs was laughing and slapping his knee as he recalled for me an incident that had taken place right there in that old facility under the management of the Soviets and their Gosplan. Their shoe operation had been assigned a quota to produce a given number of tons of military boots for the Soviet army. They were to be manufactured by a certain date, placed into huge crates, and shipped to a central warehouse. The orders from the Gosnab planning group of the Gosplan central committee had not stipulated what size the shoes should be, the style, or the color . . . just so many tons of military boots.

“Guess what we did,” my new friend howled. “We found the heaviest leather we could find and made every one of the pairs of boots size fifteen with no dying of the leather, placed them in huge crates, and let the Soviets pick them up and deliver them to their destination! They could figure out who else they wanted to make the smaller sizes. When the loads arrived at the central warehouse, the Gosplan people actually sent us a commendation and some vodka for having met our quota of tons, but no army could have ever worn those huge boots.”

Next Week: SYSTEMS MATTER: Part 7: Self Interest

            (Research ideas from Dr. Jackson’s new writing project on Cultural Economics)

 © Dr. James W. Jackson  
Permissions granted by Winston-Crown Publishing House
  
www.jameswjackson.com   

Dr. James W. Jackson often describes himself as "The Happiest Man in the World." A successful businessman, award-winning author and humanitarian, Jackson is also a renowned Cultural Economist and international consultant, helping organizations and governments to apply sound economic principals to the transformation of culture so that everyone is "better off."

As the founder of Project C.U.R.E., Dr. Jackson traveled to more than one hundred fifty countries assessing healthcare facilities, meeting with government leaders and "delivering health and hope" in the form of medical supplies and equipment to the world's most needy people. Literally thousands of people are alive today as a direct result of the tireless efforts of Project C.U.R.E.'s staff, volunteers and Dr. Jackson. 

To contact Dr. Jackson, or to book him for an interview or speaking engagement: press@winstoncrown.com

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

SYSTEMS MATTER Part 5: Investigation into Free Enterprise

Founder, Project C.U.R.E.
Author, The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist


In the year 1776, a unique serendipity occurred that eventually affected the cultural economics of the world. The unusual occasion, however, could never have taken place had King John not signed the Magna Carta at Runnymede, England, in 1215. That proclamation of emancipation for the first time established a constitutional underpinning that the power of the king could be limited by a written document. Historically, that agreement became the cornerstone of freedom and the main line of liberty against arbitrary and unjust treatment of the citizens of a nation state.

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson articulated the Declaration of Independence expressing the general thinking and desires of his countrymen. There would be a new nation formed upon the vision of the Magna Carta, established on the principle that every person is entitled to pursue his or her own values.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights: that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”(1)
The other component of that 1776 serendipity was the economic masterpiece that was published in Great Britain March 9 of that same year. Adam Smith was a brilliant and energetic professor well trained in the early concepts of economics. Smith was intrigued as he pragmatically viewed the cultures and economics of the different nations of the world. I like to think of Adam Smith as the first ever cultural economist. He was not only concerned about the charts and matrices of the discipline of economics, but was also concerned about people, jobs, human desires, motivations, factories, and systems.

Adam Smith’s intellectual curiosity drove him to seek the answer to a fascinating cultural economic question, Why are some countries rich and other countries poor? He was willing to travel and simply observe and research and then compile and report. He did not just sit back and conjecture or speculate. He did not simply rely on the jaded propaganda of the politicians. He was not trying to figure out an economic and political scheme to control the world.

Smith was not coming from a position, as was Karl Marx, where he felt his true calling in life was to debunk, destroy, and overturn the world as he had found it. Neither was he coming from a position like that of Vladimir Lenin, where he was driven to follow a different path. That path had led Lenin on a sick and vindictive payback scheme for the Czar’s hanging of his brother for the attempted assassination plot. Lenin had vowed to totally destroy, through a Marxist-style uprising, every vestige of Russia’s culture and economic system through total revolution. Adam Smith simply wanted to find out and report the answer as to why some countries were rich and some were poor.

In 1776, Adam Smith’s findings were published in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. That book established the Scotsman, Adam Smith, as the father of modern economics. He felt that “The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and detail, is the one that must rule all observation.”(2)

From their experiences and observations, Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson were each aware that concentrated government power could be a great danger to the ordinary man. They saw the protection of the citizen from the tyranny of the government as a necessary and perpetual need. Adam Smith observed that “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”(3)

Based on Smith’s observations regarding the role of government in the affairs of a nation, he concluded that it was “first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; second, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, third, the duty to erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain: because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to the great society.”(4)

So, in the nations that were viewed as better off, the functions of the governments were intentionally more restricted to protecting the civilians from enemies from without, protecting the civilians from each other from within, and establishing and maintaining certain public works that could not be offered by limited individuals.

Other principles that emerged from Smith’s observations and recorded in his book were:
  • The basic assumption that the prime psychological drive in man as an economic being is the drive of self-interest
  • He assumes the existence of a natural order in the universe which makes all the individual strivings for self-interest add up to the social good
  • The best program is to leave the economic process severely alone (non-intervention)

One more helpful insight that is gleaned from Smith’s report in the Wealth of Nations is that his definition of real wealth is the annual produce of the land and labor of the society. In other words, he sees production, or the ability to produce income, or the per capita income of a nation, as the determination of the true wealth of that nation. A nation that can produce high levels of income is wealthy. One that is capable of only low levels of income is poor.

But what is it that allows a nation to create a high level of income? Smith declares that the answer to that question is a simple one. The key to a wealthy nation is a productive nation. A productive nation is based on an economic system of individual freedom. The key lies in a system of free enterprise.

Indeed, the serendipity that came together in the year 1776 initiated a glorious experiment in economic and cultural freedom that has expanded the hopes, dreams, and expectations of the pragmatic and spiritual world of culture and economics. What now should we do with this system . . . with this dream?

Next Week: SYSTEMS MATTER: Part 6: A Productive Nation
 
(Research ideas from Dr. Jackson’s new writing project on Cultural Economics)

© Dr. James W. Jackson   
Permissions granted by Winston-Crown Publishing House
  
www.jameswjackson.com

Dr. James W. Jackson often describes himself as "The Happiest Man in the World." A successful businessman, award-winning author and humanitarian, Jackson is also a renowned Cultural Economist and international consultant, helping organizations and governments to apply sound economic principals to the transformation of culture so that everyone is "better off."

As the founder of Project C.U.R.E., Dr. Jackson traveled to more than one hundred fifty countries assessing healthcare facilities, meeting with government leaders and "delivering health and hope" in the form of medical supplies and equipment to the world's most needy people. Literally thousands of people are alive today as a direct result of the tireless efforts of Project C.U.R.E.'s staff, volunteers and Dr. Jackson. 

To contact Dr. Jackson, or to book him for an interview or speaking engagement: press@winstoncrown.com

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

SYSTEMS MATTER Part 4: MARX, COMMUNISM, and CULTURAL ECONOMICS

Founder, Project C.U.R.E.
Author, The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist


Before we move forward, I would like for us to realistically consider the radical transformation that took place in Russia as a result of Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution. In previous articles we have made the statement that all transformation takes place at the intersection of culture and economics.

It is difficult for us to comprehend what actually happened when Lenin uncompromisingly pushed for the communist agenda of totally smashing the entire culture of Russia. It was total revolution, the destruction of all systems, a declaration of complete and new ownership of all assets, all accumulation, and all wealth and value. It was an unchallenged authority with full power that would determine what each individual would access, consume, possess, or utilize. That power would determine where the individuals would live, what they would eat, the clothes they would wear, what they would read, and even what they would think or talk about.

In prior discussions we have addressed the economic components of land, labor, capital, and the entrepreneur. All of the land and production of Russia was no longer allowed to be held or even influenced by any such things as market factors or individuals. All actions of labor and work would be directed ultimately by the politburo. All capital, including personal property, all livestock, all machinery, all furniture or utensils of work would be owned, possessed, and managed by the elite politburo. As for the entrepreneur . . . there would be no such thing.

On the cultural side of the matrix, traditions would be abolished. Those institutions that carried forward those traditions would no longer legally exist. The family would be restructured and the individual would be melded into the seamless whole of the communist party.

When I think about the profound and primal transformation that took place at the very announcement of Lenin– when he declared that the Soviet government under the direction of himself, the politburo, and the enforcing management of the soldiers, the peasants and the workers– I am reminded of the scene from the film Dr. Zhivago.

When Dr. Zhivago returned to his home in Moscow, from having been conscripted to treat the wounded and medically needy of the Red Army, he was met by a houseful of newly entitled citizens who now had equal possession and management of what had formerly been his family’s home. Zhivago, his wife, and her parents had been relegated to a very small area for their living quarters. The new inhabitants were even going to hold court when they discovered that the doctor was going to use some of the wood that he had formerly owned to burn in the small stove. No longer was the wood his, neither was the stove his, nor the house!

I have tried to picture in my mind and vicariously experience with my emotions the impact of that day of announcement. The Russian economy and culture bear the stripes of inefficiency, shortage, and lost opportunity to this day.

The Chinese, in the aftermath of their Cultural Revolution and bout with communism, have been forging ahead trying to rediscover the secrets to efficiency and abundance. Russia continues to reject the phenomenon of efficient production and abundance. When it runs out of the supply it has taken from the czars, stolen from its close neighbors, or pillaged from all the old members of the former Soviet Federation, President Putin can only resort to the one strategy Russia knows for accumulation of wealth: theft by appropriation, or simply, theft.

When you don’t produce things then you must resort to taking wealth by stealing. Russia is once more embarking on the old strategy of stealing through the practice of expansionism. They must now have, again, the wealth of Ukraine.

I recall riding in an automobile near Sinuiju City on one of my trips to North Korea. As I viewed the countryside quilted with rice paddies and rectangular concrete communist housing units, I was plagued by a menacing thought. Finally, I decided to risk asking one of the communist leaders in the car this probing question:

“This is beautiful land for agriculture. I would suppose that before the Marxist revolution it had been owned continuously by four or five generations of families in succession. What was the response of the families who had owned the land for so long when Great Leader Kim Il Sung announced that they no longer owned the land, tore down their homes and dwellings, and insisted that everyone move into the rectangular concrete buildings?”

“Oh, it was a wonderful day,” was their scripted reply. “Dr. Jackson, there is no way you can understand how eager everyone was to respond to Great Leader’s glorious announcement that now no one owned anything, but everyone owned everything. From that day on Great Leader Kim Il Sung would personally take care of all of our needs. No one would be in want of anything. They were all so happy to move into their new homes with others who would be tending the communal rice fields together with them.”

I quietly continued my research over the years and discovered that the problem of surrendering the family inheritance was simply solved by graciously allowing the family members to hint at an attitude of protest only once. They were murdered. At that point the rice production strangely fed a higher percentage of the population than before. As the years have gone by the sad truth is that the population has decreased but the production has dwindled until there is not enough rice produced to even feed the hungry population, to say nothing of having any excess to sell to eager international buyers. Systems matter!

Next week, SYSTEMS MATTER Part 5: Investigating Free Enterprise.

          (Research ideas from Dr. Jackson’s new writing project on Cultural Economics)

© Dr. James W. Jackson   
Permissions granted by Winston-Crown Publishing House
  

Dr. James W. Jackson often describes himself as "The Happiest Man in the World." A successful businessman, award-winning author and humanitarian, Jackson is also a renowned Cultural Economist and international consultant, helping organizations and governments to apply sound economic principals to the transformation of culture so that everyone is "better off."

As the founder of Project C.U.R.E., Dr. Jackson traveled to more than one hundred fifty countries assessing healthcare facilities, meeting with government leaders and "delivering health and hope" in the form of medical supplies and equipment to the world's most needy people. Literally thousands of people are alive today as a direct result of the tireless efforts of Project C.U.R.E.'s staff, volunteers and Dr. Jackson. 

To contact Dr. Jackson, or to book him for an interview or speaking engagement: press@winstoncrown.com