When composing letters to their loved ones.

Such letters, remembered Leonid Sitko, were written on tiny pieces of paper, with tiny letters. Everyone signed them with false names: his was “Hamlet,” his girlfriend’s was “Marsianka.” They had been “introduced” through other women, who had told him she was extremely depressed, having had her small baby taken away from her after her arrest. He began to write to her, and they even managed to meet once, inside an abandoned mine.

I have posted on political ideology being correlated with happiness. A story in the economist has this to say.

In 2004 Americans who called themselves “conservative” or “very conservative” were nearly twice as likely to tell pollsters they were “very happy” as those who considered themselves “liberal” or “very liberal” (44% versus 25%). One might think this was because liberals were made wretched by George Bush. But the data show that American conservatives have been consistently happier than liberals for at least 35 years.

Perhaps more interesting though is the explanation one ‘expert’ gives:

Why should this be so? Mr Brooks proposes that whatever their repective merits, the conservative world view is more conducive to happiness than the liberal one (in the American sense of both words). American conservatives tend to believe that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can succeed. This makes them more optimistic than liberals, more likely to feel in control of their lives and therefore happier. American liberals, at their most pessimistic, stress the injustice of the economic system, the crushing impersonal forces that keep the little guy down and what David Mamet, a playwright, recently summed up as the belief that “everything is always wrong”. Emphasising victimhood was noble during the 1950s and 1960s, says Mr Brooks. By overturning Jim Crow laws, liberals gave the victims of foul injustice greater control over their lives. But in as much as the American left is now a coalition of groups that define themselves as the victims of social and economic forces, and in as much as its leaders encourage people to feel helpless and aggrieved, he thinks they make America a glummer place.

I actually think there is a great deal of merit to this. It seems to me that regardless of humans actually being determined, we have been biologically wired to operate optimally in a free will frame of mind. Those that have experiences that push towards determinism can generate resentment and a general unhappiness. I speak from personal experience in this regard. Having been continually rejected from prestigious graduate programs for a score on a standardized test that I can’t control has made me angry, bitter and unhappy. A large reason for my anger is my perception that I can’t control whether I get into these prestigious programs.

When you consider how other governments and economic systems work it becomes more clear just how important it is to design systems that sync with our biological need to perceive choice. Communism failed because it takes to much perception of volition from it’s people. Socialism’s failures most likely can be traced back to the same problem. Monarchies, despots, oligarchies, they all exceed a threshold in causing it’s people to perceive determinism in the outcome of their actions. Free markets and democracies on the other hand, to the extent that a state entity can facilitate the perception of volition, do the best job of doing so. Democracies give citizen a choice in what kind of laws should be applied to themselves while free markets gives consumers the maximal choice in determining what material things to populate their world with. Such choices bring about perception in volition and in turn allow our biology to run optimally.

I actually think the assertion that the biology of man is performs optimally in a free market democracy is a testable hypothesis. That is to say, one can probably show higher incidents of biological inefficiency in people living in a non-democracy. Along these lines, one could then make an argument that policy which reduces choice and increases determinism leads to institutional operation comes out of sync with our biological makeup. Passing universal health care at the federal level would push the citizenry’s perception of health care outcomes as being even more deterministic. Over time this would breed resentment and unhappiness as people biology operates in efficiently in a overly deterministic system.

Better to minimize federal policy. By its very nature it must violate human biology.

Recently I argued that communistic policy in China killed 40 million people. Dan argued that it was in fact an interaction between policy and ‘natural disasters’. In response I argued that any deaths caused by the interaction are still the responsibly of the communists since their policy created the famine that allowed the interaction to kill more people.

Dan responded with this:

Fallacy of the single cause. If you’re conceding that it is an interaction, I could just as easily pick out one of the other variables to take all the blame. It’s an arbitrary designation.

This response borders on absurdity. Allow me to illustrate.

Let us suppose that I were to forcibly move Dan into a firing range and lock the door so that he could not leave. Let us further suppose that I begin target practice firing my gun at the targets at the end of the range. Halfway through the session several of my rounds unintentionally hit Dan as he is trying to get out of the way of my gunfire. He drops to the floor with a thud and I run to him.

As I approach I can hear his breath is labored he has lost a lot of blood. It’s obvious he is going to die in the next couple of minutes. I say to him “Dan it looks like I’m responsible for your death since I forced you into the gun range and locked the door so you could not get out’.

With just a slight whisper Dan responds, “Actually it was an interaction. There is no way we can determine if the cause of my death was locking me in the shooting range or you unintentionally shooting me with your gun.”

“But Dan, even though I did not directly mean to kill you, surely you would agree that forcing and locking you in the firing range while I practice my marksmanship resulted in your death”

Dan’s eyes are starting to close and almost all of his life has leaked out of him. He is turning pallid and is moments from the great beyond. But upon hearing my last statement some vigor returns and he musters all of his remaining strength uttering with resolve, “Fallacy of the single cause. If you’re conceding an interaction, I could just as easily pick you accidently shooting me as the cause of my death. The cause of my death is arbitrarily determined.”

With that Dan’s body goes limp and his soul returns to his secularist god.

When the police came they arrested me even after I explained to them that while it might have been my fault, because of the interaction it’s hopelessly confounded and fault can not be determined. Oddly they did not find my argument compelling and still charged me with murder. Idiots.

The interaction between communistic policy and ‘natural disaster’ makes it impossible to know what caused the millions upon millions of deaths. Simply because the communistic policy forced the citizenry into a susceptibility towards natural disaster does not mean it’s the policies fault when that that susceptibility translates into death. For all we know had China implemented free market policies instead of communistic policy the ‘natural disasters’ still would of caused of millions upon millions of deaths. This interaction hopelessly confounds the cause and for that reason responsibility can not be determined.

Stupid people might argue the communist policies which produced the insufficient harvest prior to the ‘natural disasters’ is to blame for any deaths that might occur from the interaction since crop destruction from the ‘natural disasters’ would have been ameliorated by surpluses in a non-communist policy. In fact I was one of those morons. However, thanks to Dan, I know now that we can not blame policies that resulted in insufficient food to feed a population as the cause of the famine, incidentally a word that characters instances where there is insufficient food to feed a population, because later on, ‘natural disasters’ destroyed crops as well. Intelligent people know that this interaction makes it impossible to determine the blame for the millions of people that starved to death.

Or in the dying words of Dan, “the cause of death is arbitrarily determined”.

An argument between me and Dan broke out this evening. He took the position that the deaths of so many people in China during the Great Leap Forward was based on an interaction between natural disaster and economic policy.

Arguing that an interaction between economic policy and natural disaster was the cause of so much death is problematic because China underwent a series of much more stronger natural disaster in the 1990s with death rates not even close to the three years during the great leap forward.

Weather only exacerbated the suffering. Official accounts still blame the natural catastrophes for the suffering—but China’s own statistics belie this explanation.7 Undoubtedly, the drought of 1960-1 would have lowered grain supply in the worst affected provinces, but by itself it would have caused only a small fraction of the eventual nationwide death toll. During the 1990s the worst droughts and floods in China’s modern history had only a marginal effect on the country’s adequate food supply. Only a return to more rational economic policies after 1961, including imports of grain, ended the famine.

I should like to point out that in further investigating this matter, I have discovered that the largest proponent of natural disaster having any role in the death of Chinese citizens comes primarily from the communist party of China.

Until the early 1980s, the Chinese Government’s stance, reflected by the name “Three Years of Natural Disasters”, was that the famine was largely a result of a series of natural disasters compounded by some planning errors. Researchers outside China, however, generally agree that massive institutional and policy changes which accompanied the Great Leap Forward were the key factors in the famine.

Using them as a source is extremely problematic given they would would be eager to find explanations that don’t blame them for the deaths of 40 million people. To be perfectly frank, using a oppressive communistic regime’s rhetoric as means to deflect the charge of causing massive death is beneath you. You are much better than that.

Just so that we can be clear about the government type in this case. The Chinese government did this:

The Great Leap Forward planned to develop agriculture and industry. Mao believed that both had to grow to allow the other to grow. Industry could only prosper if the work force was well fed, while the agricultural workers needed industry to produce the modern tools needed for modernisation. To allow for this, China was reformed into a series of communes.

The geographical size of a commune varied but most contained about 5000 families. People in a commune gave up their ownership of tools, animals etc so that everything was owned by the commune. People now worked for the commune and not for themselves. The life of an individual was controlled by the commune. Schools and nurseries were provided by the communes so that all adults could work. Health care was provided and the elderly were moved into “houses of happiness” so that they could be looked after and also so that families could work and not have to worry about leaving their elderly relatives at home.

The commune provided all that was needed – including entertainment. Soldiers worked alongside people. The population in a commune was sub-divided. Twelve families formed a work team. Twelve work terms formed a brigade. Each sub-division was given specific work to do. Party members oversaw the work of a commune to ensure that decisions followed the correct party line.

By the end of 1958, 700 million people had been placed into 26,578 communes. The speed with which this was achieved was astounding. However, the government did all that it could to whip up enthusiasm for the communes. Propaganda was everywhere – including in the fields where the workers could listen to political speeches as they worked as the communes provided public address systems. Everybody involved in communes was urged not only to meet set targets but to beat them. If the communes lacked machinery, the workers used their bare hands. Major constructions were built in record time – though the quality of some was dubious..

Putting aside the coercion to get the people on the communes. I think one would be hard pressed to find a closer extant example of communism. Prior to this policy farmers had some ownership rights (Capitalism) either explicitly or implicitly. In 1958:

for the first time private plots were entirely abolished and communal kitchens were introduced

Which is simply to say that ownership was transfered from the individual to the state but im sure the Communist party claimed to give ownership to the communes. We normally call this communism. Notice the remarkably similarity between commune and communism. Wonder why?

a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.

How did this new organizational system fare prior to the ‘natural disasters’? If you look closely at this graph you will see a precipitous drop in food production between 1958 and 1959 prior to the ‘natural disasters’.

It’s almost like the state was not producing enough food to feed all the people prior to ‘natural disasters’.

In sum what do we have? We have a country prior to the Great Leap Forward growing enough food to feed the population. When polices that were implemented in 1958 that represent a very pure form of communism we see an immediate drop off in food production causing a famine. Subsequent ‘natural disasters’ may have interacted with the death rate, but then one would have to explain why during the 1990s China did not suffer through a worse famine given that natural disaster were much more severe and the country’s population was larger.

The greatest famine in the history of mankind was created by man. To argue that this famine was an interaction between economic policy and natural disaster is to grossly underestimate the abysmal error of state planning. The parsimonious explanation would argue that communistic policy reduced food production levels well below what was needed such that there was no surplus which could be used as aid in regions suffering from a natural disaster. The policy must take the blame for any deaths that are direct result of the interaction. In this way, all deaths during the great leap forward unequivocally lay in the hands of policy makers attempting to implement an extremely pure form of communism.

Communism kills.