After forty-five years, we went to grade their papers. The first group turned in this:
And the second group turned in this:
So it should not come as a surprise that, when the same experiment is repeated, the result is the same. The Hyundai Genesis and Equus are, by all reports, spectacular automobiles. I'm not sure what the Nork auto industry is like, but I'm sure they're every bit as deft with cars as they are hotels.
(H/T to The Adaptive Curmudgeon.)
Whenever I see an Equus, I have the urge to smash its headlights.
ReplyDeleteThere was also this thing called 'Marshall Plan', which doesn't change the statement. One principle of capitalism is that you have to invest to get returns.
ReplyDeleteThe sad thing is the success of The Left in elections, especially in eastern Germany. They haven't learned a thing.
"There was also this thing called 'Marshall Plan', which doesn't change the statement."
ReplyDeleteYou mean their socialist brethren in the USSR didn't help them rebuild? Oh, wait, right, they looted the place even further...
Don't tell West Germans it was all because of the Marshal Plan. Willy Brandt would smack your jowls to credit only it with the Wirtschaftswunder.
ReplyDeleteOops. Meant Adenauer.
ReplyDeleteNJT,
ReplyDelete"Don't tell West Germans it was all because of the Marshal Plan."
You know where Thorsten's posting from, right? ;)
Why are you h8ing on communism??? Don't you know that, as the great moralist and philosopher Whoopie Goldberg has recently said, it's great on paper???
ReplyDelete/ sarc
Communism has PR that makes Don Draper green with envy: that people continue to have any faith in it at all is a sign of the greatest ongoing con in human history.
It must be a commie dictator thing. Joe Stalin liked to design buildings, he gave one to his Polish allies.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Culture_and_Science,_Warsaw
I spent a week staying across the street from it. Never did find The Ghostbusters phone number in the local Warsaw phone book.
Gerry
docjim505,
ReplyDelete"Don't you know that, as the great moralist and philosopher Whoopie Goldberg has recently said, it's great on paper???"
It is "great on paper", assuming you have all the rigorous ethical development of a third grader, which most people do.
The idea of "everybody should share and share alike and help and love each other" crops up depressingly often in the human race because the human race is composed largely of drooling simpletons who think that they can secretly get one over on their neighbors by making them do all the work.
(In addition to the aspiring loafers, there are also the moralizing busibodies, who believe that everything would be peachy if everybody just pitched in and helped everybody else, and would love nothing better than to nag you 'til you did. For demonstrations of this type as well as the previous one, I direct you to the early church.)
ReplyDeleteIs there a communist experiment - larger than a family - that actually worked for a significant time span?
ReplyDeleteAnd even on family level it only works when nobody is abusing the system.
It doesn't work even in a family. It doesn't even work in a single bachelor with a six figure income and a doctorate's house in an American city- the pantry proof.
ReplyDeletePS, Brian J wins.
ReplyDeleteCommunism is powerful, powerful stuff. So powerful it managed to spread laziness, poverty, and hideously poor engineering in a country populated entirely by Germans.
ReplyDeleteTam - In addition to the aspiring loafers, there are also the moralizing busibodies, who believe that everything would be peachy if everybody just pitched in and helped everybody else, and would love nothing better than to nag you 'til you did.
ReplyDeleteLike I said: Whoopie Goldberg.
But ain't it funny (har-har) how those same moralizing busybodies never quite seem to get around to doing any of the pitching in and helping THEMSELVES? I guess nagging is such hard work that they figure "I've done my fair share of the work".
It doesn't work with two or four.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't work with even more.
It doesn't work with a single race.
It doesn't work in an enclosed space.
It doesn't work here or there.
It doesn't work anywhere.
I do not want to see a rerun.
Communism's time is done.
T.Stahl:
ReplyDeleteI'd put more credit in one of Patton's actions as prefect ... he pulled an economist out of a concentration camp and used him to replace one of Speer's underlings ... this economist happened to be of the Austrian school.
He promptly cancelled every last economic control law he could get his hands on.
Even then, they cheated. The Soviet car was a badly made copy of a Fiat.
ReplyDeleteNot arguing the point, but on the plus side for the North Koreans, it looks like they actually stopped building when they ran out of money - rather than just borrowing more.
ReplyDeleteASM286,
ReplyDeleteThat's not a Soviet-era Lada, which was, indeed, a Russkie copy of a Fiat 128, but rather an East German Trabant 601.
The Trabant 601 had a body made of the finest alloy of plastic and cardboard, a 2-cylinder, 2-stroke engine, and in place of a gas gauge, it had a dipstick. It made a Lada look like a Lincoln.
Oh, and you had to get it pre-ordered by your parents just after you were born, so you could get one when you received your driver's license on 18th birthday!
ReplyDeleteGreat illustration of capitalism for the masses. And the comments from your followers are priceless. Thank you for the wisdom
ReplyDeleteI'm a little late to the party and would have nothing new to add to the comments about communism, since everyone else has said pretty much what I'd be saying as well.
ReplyDeleteSo instead, I'll just say thanks for using the correct "ſ" character in "An Inquiry into the Nature and Cauſes of the Wealth of Nations", rather than going the lazy route and using a lowercase f. It made my inner typography geek happy to see that. :-)
Robin Munn,
ReplyDeleteI'm tickled to death that someone noticed. :)
Thank you!