Sunday, June 13, 2010

An argument for limited government

Mao kills 40 million:
Tombstone took its author, Yang Jisheng, nearly two decades of painstaking research to compile. In two volumes, it gives a minutely chronicled and irrefutable account of the death by starvation of 35-40 million Chinese between 1958 and 1961. It details a tragedy the ruling Communist party has long sought to cover over.

Yang’s epic work was confirmation of what any student of world affairs outside China already knew – that Mao Zedong’s utopian plans to accelerate the establishment of what he called “true Communism” had produced the worst man-made famine in recorded history....

Mao had ordered Chinese farms to be collectivised in the late 1950s and forced many peasants who had once productively grown grain to put their energies into building crude backyard blast furnaces instead. As part of this “Great Leap Forward”, Mao’s acolytes predicted that food production would be doubled, even tripled in a few years and that steel production would soon surpass output in advanced western countries. The new rural communes began reporting whopping, fake harvests to meet Mao’s demand for record grain output. When the government took its share of the grain based on the exaggerated figures, little was left for ordinary people to eat.
But Mao's intentions were good, so it's ok.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I don't think there are still many people out there (except lunatics) trying to defend communism and state-controlled economy. With 80 millions+ deaths, marxism wins hands down over nazism in number of victims in the XXth century.
However, I would love to read in your blog a discussion on the difference between "no government" and "limited government", and precisely where the limit should be...

10:29 AM  

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