The Deficiencies of Bureaucratic Planning: Reading Jacobo Timmerman on Gabriel Garcia Marquez on Fidel Castro…: Tuesday Focus

Whether you call it James Scott (as in his Seeing Like a State) or Friedrich von Hayek (“The Use of Knowledge in Society”) or Adam Smith (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations) or even Bernard de Mandeville (The Fable of the Bees), it is a very powerful insight to recognize that in the economy we want, as much as possible, to push the making of decisions out to the periphery–where the direct knowledge is, and where the direct impact of individual decisions are felt. And this is what the property-contract-market system is (or can be) good for. And this is the insight that we in North America call “neoliberalism”.

In the economy we want to push decision-making away from the center, for the center can only enforce its decisions through some thumb-fingered bureaucracy, and we want those who make the decision to feel the situation in their fingertips. In the economy we want as much as possible to push the making of decisions out to the periphery–where the direct knowledge is, and where the direct impact of individual decisions are felt.

And what is it that happens when you don’t? From Jacobo Timmerman (1990): “A Summer in the Revolution: 1987”: New Yorker:

When I read one of Gabriel Carcia Marquez’s essays on the Commandante [Fidel Castro], I was remind of paeans to Stalin–of the whole state of mind described by Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon. Garcia Marquez praises Fidel Castro for needing only six hours of sleep after a day’s hard work–the same six hours that were often presented as proof of Josef Stalin’s vitality, extolled in writings that also described his Kremlin window lit until the small hours of the night–and praises the wisdom of the Commandante in stating that “learning to rest is as important as learning to work”.

If the cumulative tasks in Fidel Castro’s workday as it is describe by Garcia Marquez are counted up, the Castro who emerges is a prodigy–someone who triumphs by supernatural intelligence:

His rarest virtue is the ability to foresee the evolution of an event to its farthest-reaching consequence

and:

He has breakfast with no less than two hundred pages of news from the entire world

(a long breakfast, surely), and:

He has to read fifty-odd documents [daily].

And the list goes on:

No one can explain how he has the time or what method he employs to read so much and so fast…. A physician friend of his, out of courtesy, sent him his newly-published orthopedic treatise, without expecting him, of course, to read it, but one week later he received a letter from Castro with a long list of observations….

There is a vast bureaucratic incompetence affection almost every realm of daily life, especially domestic happiness, which has forced Fidel Castro himself, almost thirty years after victory, to involve himself personally in such extraordinary matters as how bread is made and the distribution of beer….

He has crated a foreign policy of world-power dimensions.

Fidel Castro, then, has a secret method, unknown to the rest of mankind, for reading quickly, and he knows a lot about orthopedics, and yet thirty years after the Revolution he has not managed to organize a system for baking bread and distributing beer…

Of course, in Latin America “neoliberalism” is something other than this insight. It seems to me that it is, rather, a number of interwoven strands:

1. The belief that property–however acquired, and however held, and however dysfunctional is the politics the attempts to hold onto it generates–is morally prior to democracy.
2. The belief that violence in defense of property is always justified, up to and beyond the destruction of democracy, for democracies like social Democrats, and social Democrats are Marxists, and Marxists are Stalinists, so civilization is always under the imminent threat that the voters might make a single wrong and then irrevocable choice.
3. Over and above the fear that Stalin and the Road to Serfdom inevitably lurk just beyond the 10 hour day, the belief that the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie are worthy of defense as bearers of a higher form of civilization then the lower middle-class, the working class, and the lumpenproletariat.
4. The belief that regulation of the market beyond the defense of property and the enforcement of contract is always wrong because politics is never more then the theft of wealth from the deserving by undeserving successful rent-seekers and the “New Class” ideologues who find it so easy to dupe the voters.

And only fifth and last, in Latin America, do we reach the rational kernel inside the mystical shell that is Mont Pelerin:

The recognition that, if the distribution of wealth is not too awry, that if property and contract rights hold well, that if markets are potentially competitive and thick enough, and if externalities are minimal or are compensated for through taxes and bounties, then The market provides extraordinarily powerful and unequalled social calculating, coordinating, and distribution mechanism for managing our immensely complicated social division of labor.

845 words