perfidy

Try Zimbabwe. Women have to make a choice between maxi pads or rent. It's ridiculous. Paper is so cheap here in the US. Yet if a woman in an African nation picks up the product just to look at it in the super market, she gets laughed at. I can't find the link anymore, but if I find it, I'll send it to you.

J:

Might I ask where this "at its best" you refer to might be found, just for comparative purposes?

Soviet Russia for the first 10 years or so wasn't as bad as the later stuff, that would probably be as close to "best" as you're gonna get.

A- that's pretty much what I'm driving at. Nice save! The funny part being that the first ten years of Soviet Russia were pretty effing bad indeed.

My use of "best" in the context of central planning is two-sided. First, an acknowledgement that even within the world of Communist/authoritarian regimes there's ones that worked better than others, much in the way that Windows 95 worked better than 3.1, in the way that roller-skating on the New Jersey Turnpike is safer than roller-skating on the Washington DC beltway. The other side of this is a sop to the inevitable bleat of "but... but... Communism has never been tried yet, really!" To which I say, "fine. Marx wrote a gripping analysis of economics... Wells wrote a gripping account of time travel, and we're still waiting on that time machine. QED"

So, Patton, there's a glimpse of the worlds spinning within my fevered mind. I qualify everything on several levels, because in my head I'm still in graduate school and it's a cinch that some po-mo moron is going try to shoot me down for not being thorough (or for being ideologically impure, or for being inadequately hedged against charges of ideological impurity, or unconscious of the voices of the subaltern actors in whatever hegemonic synthesis we are currently discussing, etc.).

Understood, but some things (not most - just some) really are absolute, eh? And you're allowed to admit that, but not until you're out of grad school. Uh, and modern academia.

Qualification, just to show I'm "sensitive to others' potential realities: Equality is a good thing. A good thing to wish for, that is. Soviet-style central planning has never successfully enforced it. Ever. And there's a set of clear empirical reasons. So it won't matter how often it's tried. But you already knew that.

And I'll never, ever be able to top your "Tampon Theory", so I won't try, because the two best books on economics I've ever read are Bastiat's "Economic Sophisms" and O'Rourke's "Eat the Rich".

Patton, thanks for the kudos. I'm not an economist, but rather a historically-trained dispenser of on the nose bon mots and apt metaphors. Well, it's better than being a critical theorist. I have always thought that the problem with Soviet theory and Marxian economics in general is that they're trying to level downward. Come join us down here in the muck! Ooh! There's some lovely filth down here! Capitalism, on the other hand, tends (qualifier: tends, qualifier II, fabulously wealthly outliers aside) to level upward, and increase the floor for all.

As regards the lingering effects of graduate school, I often find myself complaining to my wife that I "don't ever use my history degree." To the extent that, since getting my MA, I have not spent any time ensmartening young minds in the classroom, attending conferences, or publishing turgid and unreadable papers on inconceivably arcane topics, this is true.

But she points out that the training in research and analysis I got, I use all the time. She's right. Like at the supermarket. Is the tuna fresher than the salmon? Better look closer! Which is better, the Barilla or the store brand bowtie pasta? And in the rest of my life too! Is the new Queer Eye probably going to be a corker? Better check the internet! It's hard being the go-to guy when people want help finding out when movies are playing, or where the best deals are on DVD players this week. My historical training saves the day every time.

But that bullshittery aside, here's the nub. Absolute truths can be qualified if you try hard enough, and it's a habit that five years of postacademic freedom has yet to shake me free of. On one level such exchanges are like arguing about which shade of black paint is blacker ("It's black.... there's none more black") or how far past 10 you can push the volume knob. But on another, starting with the statement "Slavery was an economic system and social arrangement that was terrible for the enslaved and benefited the enslavers," and nuancing that to differentiate between the incredible variances in situation that actually existed-- without disturbing the underlying truth of the initial statement that slavery might have sucked a ton for slaves and vice versa-- can be both fun and enlightening. And yet, also faintly ludicrous.