Great Ironies of Economic Policy

One of the great ironies of economic policy is that the historical role of the Vietnamese Communist Party has turned out to be that of a union-busting gang labor boss for Nike and other first-world manufacturing corporations.

Max Sawicky identifies a second great irony:

MaxSpeak, You Listen!: IT HAS COME TO THIS : Forgive me for repeating myself, but for job growth, this has been one stinky recovery.... [A]ctual job growth can be accounted for by growth in public sector jobs. And there's nothing wrong with that. However: The upshot is that the triumph of Republican-conservatarian economic policy consists of an expansion of government jobs financed by loans from the Communist People's Republic of China.

Comments

[sm]

The communists in power have always been union busting gang labor bosses for somebody -- usually their own state apparatus.

[Read what I wrote again please]

[Charles]

This is as old as Orwell's Animal Farm. The pigs and the humans... which is which?

[Randolph Fritz]

The term for that economic system is "state capitalism."

[save_the_rustbelt]

Don't accude Bush of being a conservative.

He is whatever Karl Rove tells him to be, which is usually corporate whore.

[Ted]

"...financed by loans from the Communist People's Republic of China"

I see this all the time, but isn't it also true we swapped tax revenue for new debt to our own wealthy taxpayers whose taxes we cut? I see very little discussion of that, but isn't it true? (has anyone run the numbers?)

[Ironymoose]

The definition of irony that applies to this situation in which
1. Rovian-Norquist Republicans have added jobs by adding jobs in the public sector
and
2. Communists - the "champions of the workers" are union busting slavers for capitalists
is:
Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs. example from Answers.com

“Hyde noted the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated” (Richard Kain).

[Buce]

Just heard Tom DeLay tell Chris Matthews he is proud of having cut govt spending and balanced the budget.

[RT]

Like Bush and Goldwater conservatism, Communism in China, Vietnam, and North Korea has ceased to be about anything but power. The only 'Communist' state that Marx would remotely recognize would be Cuba.

Castro's not shy about wielding power, either, and shows no reluctance in silencing dissenting voices. But at least, along the way, he sees to it that Cubans are well-educated, have access to decent health care, and share more or less equally in what little wealth the nation generates.

In Cuba, there's more than a flicker of the notion that the state's power serves some sort of ideal - but that notion has long since been extinguished in the 'People's Republic' of China, and in the other East Asian Communist countries.

[dsquared]

Brad you keep saying this about Vietnam and I really don't recognise it. For one thing, the Nike factories in Vietnam are not particularly bad; the labour conditions there are rather better than in other parts of Southeast Asia (Nike factories in general are pretty good places to work in SE Asia, largely thanks to the success of the campaigns of the 1990s). For another, the Vietnamese state is pretty developmental in a lot of ways; it provides free education across the country, and everyone admits that they have pretty much covered themselves in glory when it came to their response to the SARS and avian flu outbreaks. They provide healthcare which is very good given the standard of income of the country.

I don't want to be an apologist for Vietnamese communism; it is still a totalitarian state and its treatment of the Montagnards is disgraceful. But it isn't a "gang labour boss" in this sense and saying that it is really does betray an uncuriousness about what's actually happening.