Book Reviews

The reason, says Rydenfelt, is eco logical: people are dependent on their economic and social envi ronments, and when individual entrepreneurs are discouraged by oppressive government-imposed con straints the creativity that feeds everybody languishes. There is some elaboration of Ry denfelt's general thesis in an open ing section devoted to the im portance of the entrepreneurial en vironment. Like George Gilder in 318 America, Rydenfelt thinks the sup ply of entrepreneurial incentive is more important than the supply of capital. If a man has a good idea, and there are no regulations to prevent him from pushing it, he will get the capital he needs somehow. Once having established the out lines of his theory of the general im portance of the entrepreneurial cli mate, however, Sven Rydenfelt rapidly shifts the emphasis of his book. What he is really interested in doing is to show how socialist gov ernments mess up their agricultural policies, bringing starvation by their treatment of the peasants.

Formulafor Famine· Communist and socialist govern ments, no matter how they come to power, are impelled by Marxist the ory to favor the industrial proletarPATrERN FOR FAILURE 319 iat. Partly this is due to Marx's own contempt for what he considered the stupidity of country life. Depending on the city workers to keep them in power, socialist governments fix the price they are willing to pay the peasants at a point that is low enough to guarantee cheap food to the urban masses. It doesn't matter whether the peasant keeps nominal title to his acres or not-the failure to let farmers sell their crops as they please reduces the incentive to pro duce. Peasants will normally work hard enough to keep their own fam ilies fed, but without market free dom there will be nothing extra to forestall possible famines. Sven Rydenfelt's evidence, which is elaborately displayed, is that the famines always come. The pattern was set in Soviet Russia, when there was drought in the Ukraine in the years after the Bolshevik takeover.

There wouldn't have been serious trouble if there had been a stored re serve. But the civil war had emptied the grain bins. Lenin used the weather as an excuse. But he was re alistic enough to postpone agricul tural collectivism. Telling the peasants to enrich themselves-i.e., to become kulaks he proclaimed the so-called NEP, or New Economic Policy. The theory was too successful to please Stalin, who, in the early Thirties, decided to break the power of the kulaks and establish big state farms. The result John Chamberlain's book re views have been a regular fea ture of The Freemansince 1950. We are doubly grateful to John and to Henry Regnery for now making available John's auto biography,A LifeWiththePrinted Word. Copies of this remarkable account of a man and histimes our times-are availableat $6.00 from The Foundation for Eco nomic Education, Irvington-on Hudson, New York 10533.

was a forced famine that killed some three million skilled agricultur alists. Stalin in Charge Stalin claimed successes for the new collectives, but when Khrush chev decided to expose the excesses of Stalinism, one of the first figures he revealed was that in 1953 Russia had fewer livestock than it had in 1913, when there were 60 million fewer people to feed. In the long run Khrushchev proved to be no improvement on Stalin as a farm manager. His attempt to bring new acres under cultivation in semi arid areas worked out badly. Ryden felt says there were crop failures in Russia in nine out of twenty years between 1963 and 1983. The excuse was always that the weather had been bad. The Communist high com320 THE FREEMAN mand solved the problem of the re cur·rent shortages by importing grain from the capitalist West. Sven Rydenfelt follows his section on the failures of Soviet agricultural planning with chapters on what has happened to farming in Poland, Ro mania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Portugal, China, India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Tan zania, Cuba and Argentina.

In all cases save that of Hungary the courses followed by communist or "planning" governments have re sulted in general impoverishment. Freeman binders The Hungarians have saved them selves by letting their· peasants sell their produce in the open market. There is a repetitive quality to Sven Rydenfelt's story, but this is bone and marrow of the central point that he is determined to drive home. Rydenfelt's examples do not in clude Ethiopia, Angola, Mozam bique, Chad and the general sub-Sa haran region in Africa. But we know from the news stories that there are no exceptions to Rydenfelt's rule that, where socialism prevails, star vation is just around the corner. .® • handsome blue leatherlex • each binder holds twelve issues • a handy way to organize current and past issues of The Freeman $5.00 each Order from: THE FOUNDATIONFOR ECONOMICEDUCATION,INC. IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON,NEW YORK 10533 the Freeman VOL. 35, NO. 6 • JUNE 1985 The Positive ApproachA Page on Freedom, No. 20 Why freedom outperforms socialism.