Kim Jong-Obama and the Success of the Command-and-Control Economy

The essential summary of the Statist form of government comes to us courtesy of George Will:

Progressives generally, and Obama especially, encourage expectations as large as the 1,428-page (cap-and-trade), 1,566-page (financial reform) and 2,409-page (health care) bills they churn out as "comprehensive" solutions to this and that. For a proper progressive, anything short of a "comprehensive" solution to, say, the problem of illegal immigration is unworthy of consideration.

In aggregate, these bills represent nothing less than a Stalinist brand of authoritarian, industrial policy.

It is the Democrats' ideal form of government, in which a few masterminds create an endless series of bureaucracies, agencies and offices that are staffed with supporters and hacks. They -- not individuals -- make the decisions. They -- not individuals -- command and control. They -- not the people -- create a system that is the antithesis of the American experiment.

The benefits of the command-and-control economy are aptly demonstrated in countries like Cuba, Zimbabwe and North Korea, where the masterminds have total control.

And yet, once in a blue moon, even the Statist's newspaper of record -- The New York Times -- is forced to come to grips with the economic destruction that is inevitably wrought by the Statist's insane policies.

Like many North Koreans, the construction worker lived in penury. His state employer had not paid him for so long that he had forgotten his salary. Indeed, he paid his boss to be listed as a dummy worker so that he could leave his work site. Then he and his wife could scrape out a living selling small bags of detergent on the black market.

It hardly seemed that life could get worse. And then, one Saturday afternoon last November, his sister burst into his apartment in Chongjin with shocking news: the North Korean government had decided to drastically devalue the nation’s currency. The family’s life savings, about $1,560, had been reduced to about $30...

Last month the construction worker sat in a safe house in this bustling northern Chinese city, lamenting years of useless sacrifice. Vegetables for his parents, his wife’s asthma medicine, the navy track suit his 15-year-old daughter craved — all were forsworn on the theory that, even in North Korea, the future was worth saving for.

“Ai!” he exclaimed, cursing between sobs. “How we worked to save that money! Thinking about it makes me go crazy.”

North Koreans are used to struggle and heartbreak. But the Nov. 30 currency devaluation, apparently an attempt to prop up a foundering state-run economy, was for some the worst disaster since a famine that killed hundreds of thousands in the mid-1990s...

“If you don’t trade, you die,” said [a] former teacher, a round-faced 51-year-old woman with a ponytail. She went from obedient state employee to lawbreaking trader, but could not escape her plight...

...The government periodically tries to rein in the markets, regulating prices, hours, types of goods sold, the sellers’ age and sex and even whether they haul their wares on bicycles or their backs...

...For the construction worker, his sister’s news of the coming devaluation unleashed a furious scramble to salvage the family nest egg. He emptied the living-room cabinet drawer that held their savings and split it with his wife and daughter, telling them, “Buy whatever you can, as fast as you can.”

The three bicycled furiously to Chongjin’s market. “It was like a battlefield,” he said.

Thousands of people frantically tried to outbid one another to convert soon-to-be worthless money into something tangible. Some prices rose 10,000 percent, he said, before traders shut down, realizing that their profits soon would be worthless, too.

The three said they returned home with 66 pounds of rice, a pig’s head and 220 pounds of bean curd. The construction worker’s daughter had managed to purchase a small cutting board and a used pair of khaki pants. Together, he said, they spent the equivalent of $860 for items that would have cost less than $20 the day before...

This is Obama's Utopia.

This is the inevitable result of masterminds trying to defy thousands of years of human experience; trying to defy the limits on government codified by our highest law: the Constitution.

This is tyranny. And it is the road on which we travel.


Related: Whom Despots Fear.