I know I’ve been lax on these the past week or so. I’ll give you my excuse, but that is all it is, an excuse: I’m currently in the middle of something very quotable, but I want to finish it before borrowing from it. Give me until next week.
Today I would like to show something I found at Samizdata that I thought both funny and poignant.
Samizdata commenter Shannon Love responding to an admirer of the Chilean economy under the socialist Salvador Allende
Bragging about low unemployment under hyper-inflation is like bragging about the airspeed of aircraft in a power dive towards the ground.
It’s funny cause it’s true.
Socialist dictators like Allende respond to criticism of their hammering industry by calling everyone to enroll for government “jobs”. Since these jobs are usually meaningless make-work, and just an excuse to redistribute more private money to the masses, any “employment” figures from these nations are ALWAYS suspect.
When the state orders you to have a “job”, but doesn’t require any level of productivity, and pays for your work output with phony money they just printed up for the purpose, that’s not an economy that can be compared to any other where standard measures of work and compensation are followed.
Of course, you can’t get a Socialist to believe this, because nothing a Socialist leader does can ever be considered wrong by a Socialist.
It’s the Kool-Aid they dispense with the phony paychecks, don’t you know?