“Our state cannot and should not continue maintaining companies productive entities, services and budgeted sectors with bloated payrolls (and) losses that hurt our economy. Job options will be increased and broadened with new forms of non-state employment, among them leasing land, cooperatives and self-employment, absorbing hundreds of thousands of workers in the coming years.”
Did the Obama administration and our Democratically-controlled Congress suddenly come to their senses? Did Republicans finally come up with a concrete agenda for the upcoming November election? Did some Tea Party candidate burnish his conservative credentials?
No, no, and no. Unbelievable as it may seem, the above statement was released by the official labor federation–of Cuba. The Communist regime has announced plans to “downsize” their public sector workforce by more than 500,000 employees, and then attempt to reemploy those workers into the private sector. And that’s just the beginning. Cuba announced that more than one million government jobs would eventually be cut, and that there will be fewer state-sector openings in the future.
The reason cited for such massive cuts? To “increase efficiency in the state sector.” In other words, the most steadfast Communist nation in the western hemisphere has embraced one of the most decidedly un-Communist philosophies of all: limited government.
Such a development in and of itself is stunning enough. But in August, Cuban leader Raul Castro pushed the stake even deeper into the heart of progressive thinking. Speaking before the Cuban National Assembly, he revealed an attitude remarkably similar to the one held by a substantial number of Americans regarding our own welfare state:
“We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world in which people can live without working.”
Raul Castro has very little to worry about in that regard. Ninety miles to his north, there is a country where millions of people can live without working. It is a country where “efficiency in the public sector” is an oxymoron. It is a country which, despite a nagging recession, has increased public sector payrolls at every level of government, even as its private sector has hemorrhaged millions of jobs. It is a country being pushed to the brink of insolvency by the very same ideological bankruptcy that Cuba is now rejecting.
The latest announcement follows a curious remark made by the former leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro. At a recent lunch with Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent with Atlantic magazine, Goldberg asked the 84-year-old ex-president if he still thought Cuba’s economic system was worth exporting. ”The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us any more,” said the former Maximum Leader.
A day later, he recanted: ”My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system no long works–neither for the United States nor the world, which it steers from crisis to crisis, which are ever more serious, global and repetitive, and from which there is no escape. How could such a system work for a socialist country like Cuba?” he asked.
Apparently we’re going to find out, and with good reason: despite all propaganda to the contrary, much of which emanates from the American Left, Cuba’s economy is abysmal. Its infrastructure is in tatters, and the average monthly salary of $25 keeps most of the nation in enduring poverty. The agricultural sector is even worse, producing chronic food shortages, and a revealing joke about centrally-planned, state-run enterprises: the Communist revolution’s three biggest failings are breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Cuba currently employs 85% of its workforce in the public sector, which the official labor federation now characterizes as “ultimately counterproductive, creating bad habits and distorting worker conduct.” The basis of their reasoning? Providing Cubans with a minimal salary, a ration book and “free” healthcare and education has produced national torpor. And once again, Cubans have found the dark humor connected to their plight: ”they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”
What is Raul Castro really introducing to the Cuban economy? The very same thing the Democrat Party and the Obama administration are doing their best to undermine here in America: incentive. It is an incentive completely at odds with progressivism’s worship of “social justice,” which is nothing more than the attempt to equate equality of outcome with equality of opportunity. For our progressive true-believers, economics is a zero-sum game in which every winner invariably produces a loser–one with a “just” claim to a substantial part of the winner’s largesse. A largesse which must be “re-distributed” by a ruling class which has self-anointed itself as the official arbiters of “fairness.”
Yet as Cuba is belatedly discovering, when no distinction is made between people with ambition and talent, and those who are lazy and unproductive, sloth and inefficiency triumphs. Absent incentive, the prevailing attitude can be reduced to two words: Why bother?
Americans are becoming quite familiar with sloth and inefficiency. Such has become the hallmark of government at every level. Perhaps at this particular moment, so close to the tragic anniversary of 9⁄11, the most glaring example of such is the failure that surrounds the rebuilding of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. And not just with regard to the rebuilding of the towers. The Deutsche Bank building, slated for demolition due to irreparable damage sustained in the same attack, is still standing three years after two firefighters were killed battling a blaze at the abandoned building.
Nine years after the attacks of 9⁄11, the site remains a testament to what we have become: the same city which planned and built the Empire State Building in fourteen months is incapable of putting up–or knocking down–a building in less than nine years.
This November, Americans will get an opportunity to reject the very same ideology the most dedicated proponents of that ideology are themselves rejecting. Much like their Eastern European counterparts, Cubans are finally discovering that a theoretical view of human nature cannot compete with the reality that most human beings travel the path of least resistance. Absent incentive, that path leads directly to the bottom of the economic barrel.
It took Eastern Europe seventy years to learn this lesson, after which the Berlin Wall was torn down–from the inside. Cubans have endured sixty years of misery masquerading itself as social justice.
Americans? With any luck, the November elections will demonstrate that we’re far quicker learners.
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