How could a person who was so wrong about Thatcher’s Britain ( which she presumably experienced as a grown up) be reliable about any other ideological topic?

No Graeme, collectivism and compulsion are two different subjects. Although both are generally considered 100% bad I don’t think this is invariably the case. I mentioned the collectivism of asian societies which seems to have economic benefits (certainly in Korea) and would highlight compulsory voting in Australia. I hated being forced to vote, but having now seen what happens without it in the UK, I’d say democracy is better served by the compulsion.

The balance is just to the left of total deregulation.

You seem to be suggesting that compulsion for compulsions sake has some bizzare merit to it.

But we ought to always be reducing the sum total of compulsion.

That means always reducing, refining and eliminating regulations where we can.

And working twice as hard to do so when we find ourselves adding more.

And pretty much all the ones that we add ought to be sunsetted.

This is not just an anti-socialism thing. No-one thought through how things would pan out with the accumulation of regulations, laws, case history and so forth.

There is a reduction to absurdity here where you can’t get your ass out the door without violating all sorts of immortal laws and statutes.

There is no compromise or balancing act to be had with this malign process.

We just need to keep getting less and less of this compulsion instead of more and more.

Sometimes short-term problems arise which would seem to justify compulsion.

Ok then so deal with the short-term problem then the new laws dissolve of their own accord while you have been re-writing, compressing or eliminating mountains of old ones.

Hi there. As someone who went through all this I can tell you that I do not recall anything good about YP as a movement. Its purpose was indoctrination, brainwashing and submission. Of course since all this was compulsory and penetrating all your life Orwellian-style, it is understandable that some people may remember their childhood with fondness - but I will contend all good was happening despite the YP organization, not because of it.

Thanks Boris, I was waiting for you to drop by, considering you’re pretty damn expert in these matters. I’d be interested in your recollections of your time in the YP - if you’ve got time to write about it, of course. I’ll pop your piece up as a guest post.

No. He was too famous and prestigious for that.

Essentially his producer Schumyatsky took the rap for the disasterous Bezhin Meadow . Stalin decided basically to pin the blame on him rather than on Eisenstein who was the premiere Sov director and world famous.

Eisenstein then started Ivan.

Part Two was banned until old Joe dropped dead and Sergei preceded him by several years. Brain hemorhage not bullet.

In my time as the regime was ageing, so was YP movement which was becoming just a hypocritical shell of its former self. But In its early days it was involved in such activities as reporting “enemies of the people” to NKVD, including among their family and friends http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov. Not so different from HY.

At the end of the day, certain cultures are more conducive to freedom then others. I’m not sure that there’s much we can do about it other then to set a good example.

Though I admit I know very little about Japan.

As a woman I would point out that there is compulsion and then there is compulsion (this cross links a bit to the FGM thread). I don’t think there is any legislation in Japan that says married women can’t work, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a woman who has been able to keep her job after getting married.

Catallaxy is a libertarian collective.

It’s compulsion that is the critical issue.

Collectivism has certain benefits, though it seems to work best in cultures where the approach has been long established (asia). Japan has a very collectivist social culture, but that certainly hasn’t made it anti-capitalist. China now seems to be trying to copy Japan and using the benefits of collectivism (in this case expressed politically) for capitalist gain.