Volume 1: A sound on Wall Street, Xinxiang City is busy copying books Chapter 23: Critical Years
Subtitle of this chapter: Left or right, the battle will be decided in one go...well, actually it will take two or three more times.
After driving away these guys, Yuan Yan suddenly embarked on the path to becoming a master again.
In fact, he has not read Socialism in its entirety. He has heard of the author of this book for a long time, but he is not very familiar with it.
One of the most famous things about Mr. Mises is that he had a good disciple, the author of The Road to Serfdom, a must-read for introductory books for public intellectuals, and the winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics, an Austrian-British economist, Friedrich August von Hayek .
The life experiences and academic careers of this pair of master and apprentice confirm a saying: a person's destiny depends not only on personal struggle but also on the course of history.
As an economist and history enthusiast, Yuan Yanshu knew that 1920 was a very important year. Just one month ago, a key event that profoundly influenced the course of history occurred in Europe. That was the "Miracle of the Vistula."
History has its inevitability, such as the confrontation between the two major national groups of capitalism and socialism; but it also has its contingency, such as the "Miracle on the Vistula" which delayed the formation of the two major groups by thirty years, and because of the emergence of nuclear weapons, they ultimately only had a "cold war" and did not really fight.
In mid-August this year, the Soviet Red Army approached Warsaw, and most military experts around the world believed that Poland would definitely fail. If the Red Army broke through the Warsaw defense line, they would ignite old Europe, which was already covered with dry wood. If this fire really started, it was not impossible for the whole of Europe to be quickly turned into a communist.
As Churchill, before he became a fat man, said: "Behind the retreating Polish front, in every town the germ cells and organizations of Communism emerged from their hiding places, ready to welcome the birth of the new Soviet Republic."
Germany's unemployed workers and veterans of World War I have organized themselves to replicate the October Revolution in Berlin; the French people are marching to protest their government's support for Poland's war, and the Paris Commune may soon be recreated; in London, the British Labour Party announced that British workers will never participate in a war with Poland as an ally, and this time don't expect the "European troublemakers" to organize an anti-Soviet alliance like the anti-French alliance; transport workers in Central and Eastern European countries refused to transport arms to Poland, but instead intercepted a portion of the arms and secretly organized underground armed forces.
Old Europe seemed to be in a state of collapse, and New Rome was really good in comparison. The railroad workers proposed a very moderate "Plumb Plan", in which they demanded that their representatives be sent to participate in the management of the railroad; the members of the United Mine Union of America were a little more radical, and they voted last year to support the nationalization of mines across the United States; in North Dakota and nearby grain-producing states, a non-partisan alliance of 200,000 farmers, known as the "Farmers' Soviets," emerged.
The biggest headache for the American upper class and the bourgeoisie is the Industrial Workers of the World, which is known as the "root of all evil." How bad are these guys? Not only did they force the capitalists to implement an eight-hour workday, ban child labor, and provide unemployment benefits... they also organized around the world to seize control of global capital!
Be it emperors, kings, presidents, prime ministers, or premiers...the ruling classes of all countries are trembling in fear and are completely at a loss.
At this critical moment, the Polish commander Piłsudski suddenly appeared on the scene. Under his command, the Polish general Pingdu Zhenlu Da|Popo finally showed his prowess at the critical moment and finally subdued the town of Chilu..
In 1812, Napoleon I was killed in the Great Fire of Moscow, which was ignited by the Russian general Kutuzov. One hundred and eight years later, the "Red Napoleon" Tukhachevsky died in Warsaw, which made the international communist movement "eternally"The loss of the historical opportunity to liberate all mankind also gave the world's big capitalists a chance to breathe. Although they will have to painfully cut their own flesh in the future, it is better than being swept away by a wave.
Now the capitalist powers have become weaklings that need to be saved by the big populace. Compared with the depressed capitalist world nine years later, the Soviet Union, which is thriving in its first five-year plan (1928-1932), fully demonstrates the superiority of socialism.
Although it was hard for Yuan Yanshu, who had once lined up in front of the US consulate for a visa interview, to imagine this, he did know that in real history, the American people would line up in front of the Soviet embassy to apply for immigration, and later not only the literary and art circles, cultural circles, and academic circles, but also the governments of Western countries were filled with a large number of leftists and red spies. The best example of this was the "Cambridge Five", all of whom were born into British aristocratic families. With a bright future ahead of them, they voluntarily and semi-voluntarily joined the KGB as communist spies.
That was truly an era of idealists whose ideals were so popular that they became red hot.
This is because even though the socialist planned economy has thousands of disadvantages, it only has one advantage over the capitalist market economy, which is that the government can actively create demand, and the key is that the greater the courage, the greater the demand.
Insufficient demand or excess supply is really just a problem for capitalism. Socialism’s headache is always shortage, shortage, and shortage again, so much so that the ticket economy later became synonymous with planned economy.
Therefore, the liberal economists who were not even wanted by the government were not well received in the following decades. It was not until more than half a century later, especially after the oil crisis in 1973, that they could raise their heads again. Finally, they loosened the mountain of Keynesianism that was weighing on their heads, and finally became the only winners in this academic dispute and the political struggle of various interest groups. Of course, this is the case in the mainstream (actually the West) economics community, and there is still a dispute in the non-mainstream (actually a certain non-Western big country).
Old Michael happened to be ahead, and he couldn't even get a regular teaching position in the second half of his life; Little Harry happened to be behind, even though he dragged Churchill down after World War II and he couldn't even be elected prime minister, and later became the standard-bearer of anti-totalitarianism.
