Real victims

In an earlier post, encouraging people to contribute to the Victims of Communism Memorial, I erroneously referred to Czeslaw Milosz as a Czech, and went on to discuss the Soviet crackdown on Czechoslovakia in August of 1968. Lenka Reznicek of the University of Chicago writes

Thank you very much for your mentioning the memorial for victims of Communism, and the events of 1968’s “Prague Spring.” There’s a personal connection for me—I was born there in January of that year, and my family fortunately managed to emigrate to the U.S. in November after a brief stay with friends in Vienna—no mean feat, from what I’ve heard. I have no memories of that time, of course, but they’ve been part of my family’s lore to this day. Great posts! I especially enjoyed your insights on “Are They Really Victims of Communism?”

Thank you, Ms. Reznicek, and I’m glad to hear of your family’s escape from communism. Here’s some more on “Are they really victims of communism?” from Justice And Its Surroundings by Anthony de Jasay:

Socialism in its undiluted, genuine version implies a command economy. There is nothing pejorative in this term: it is factually descriptive. It means that all significant production and distribution decisions are taken by “social choice” and backed by the sovereign power vested in it. They are broken down by central planning into detailed instructions concerning factor inputs, product outputs, incomes, and prices. The instructions are meant to be coherent and capable of being executed by agents of “society” from managers down to workers. Coherence ex ante, if it is achieved, does not secure coherence ex post, because the system is necessarily rigid yet exposed to random shocks, shortfalls, and stoppages. Any variable not subject to a specific instruction or target backed by adequate sanctions, has a natural propensity to follow the line of least resistence and take on the “wrong” value; inputs, prices, wages, and investment expenditures will be too high for given outputs, outputs will be too low for given inputs, labor productivity too low for a given equipment, quality too low for a given price, and so on. This tendency necessitates an ever finer breakdown of targets and constraints, and runs counter to attempts at simplifying and decentralizing the system by one ingenious reform after another. The agents of the political authority owe it obedience, but the more exacting are their orders and the greater is their complexity, the stronger will be the likelihood of laxism in execution and dissimulation of failures. For these and other reasons, the nature of the genuinely socialist economic mechanism demands severe enforcement in order to perform anywhere near as intended—yet severe enforcement is costly. However, the innocent belief that the corresponding “Stalinist” features of socialist systems are merely residual effects of the personal proclivities of the individual of the same name, seems nevertheless ineradicable from much public discourse.

The typical by-products of the genuinely socialist economic steering mechanism are twofold. First, despite the humanitarian strands of the creed, the need for severe enforcement brings into being an authoritarian political system that must make heavy exertions to legitimate itself and leaves little room for democratic trappings. Political relaxation is quickly translated into a worsening economic performance that may degenerate into uncontrolled rout. Second, even under fairly rigorous authoritarian rule, the mechanism lends itself poorly to its intended purpose. The “social choices” it is supposed to put into effect prove in general to be partly or wholly unenforceable.

Id. at 200-01.