10/06/2006 12:34:26 pm
How the Core of Communism Creates Poverty. Yesterday, I had a meeting with the French writer Guy Sorman. Among other things, he is interested in the failure of the so-called social model. He is the author of several globally successful books and his latest release is about China. The content is partly based on the experiences from spending one year there. One observation that he mentioned is significant. What he constantly heard from poor people in the countryside was that they wanted to own their land. It is now owned by the state and the Communist Party usually changes the use of the land by whims. The poor people thereby don?t dare do investments such as planting an apple tree. In a few years when there will be apples, they may not posess the tree any more. Karl Marx once defined the core of Communism in one sentence as abolishing private property. Indeed, then, there is no coincidence that it creates poverty. People don?t own things, they don?t run their lives, they cannot plan for the future. A direct consequence of the ideology. And indeed one of the main causes of the remaining poverty in the world today.