| ▲ | dluan 5 hours ago |
| The greatest feat that Mao achieved was to take the land that had been tightly gripped by generations upon generations of owners and to shake up the distribution of it so that the land could produce again. People naturally want to work the land, but you end up with suboptimal inertia because owners just end up letting it sit fallow if it doesn't immediately return. It's how you turn a billion serfs into a billion entrepreneurs. We're already way past the point where a creative cocktail of 10 different progressive taxation schemes could feasibly fix the root of the problem, and you feel this especially if you were born after the year 2000. You're more likely to see results if you pick up a red scarf than if you pass a higher wealth tax, sales tax, land tax, consumption tax, estate tax... |
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| ▲ | jonahx 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > shake up the distribution of it so that the land could produce again... It's how you turn a billion serfs into a billion entrepreneurs. In your telling, how does the resulting famine that killed of tens of millions fit in? |
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| ▲ | Clent 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The famine is unrelated to the land distribution but also the farm land distribution didn't last. They changed course and put the land into collectives and it is still in collectives today so the famine cannot be blamed on collectives. My understanding is the famine was essentially the middle managers of these collectives over stating yields and being too afraid to admit their lies. To maintain the lie, they shipped off food while the farmers starved. | | |
| ▲ | jonahx 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > They changed course and put the land into collectives and it is still in collectives today so the famine cannot be blamed on collectives. Painting it as if Mao era collectives are the same as the state quotas that exist today is highly misleading. The HRS was 1979: "The household responsibility system replaced collective farming." [1] Broadly speaking, the collectives can and should be blamed for the famine, just as in the Ukraine. Getting into the weeds on the specific mechanisms is fine, but using it to undermine the broader lesson is apologetics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_responsibility_syste... |
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| ▲ | dluan 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Famine along the yellow river and yangtze river has been happening for thousands of years across all dynasties, its specifically what land distribution was meant to fix, and since 1960s there hasn't been a famine since. My parents and grandparents lived through it and left cities to work in countryside fields during the cultural revolution. You tell me how the famine fits in and I'll let you know if you're accurate or not. | | |
| ▲ | jonahx 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I'll let you know if you're accurate or not I think not. Your framing thus far is so wildly inaccurate that I believe this is a propaganda account, and hesitate to engage further. But in case any not familiar with the history read this in passing, I will leave a reference to an actually reputable source: "Mao’s violent collectivization and forced labour campaigns during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) led to as many as 45 million deaths in what is widely regarded as the worst famine in human history." [1] [1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/arti... | | |
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| ▲ | idbnstra 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| those who advocate for land value tax are usually advocating for single/minimal types of taxes (and, in fact, against sales and income taxes) rather than a cocktail of them. "Single Tax" predominantly refers to a single land value tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_tax |
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| ▲ | dluan 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | My point is that a single land value tax would have the same effect as piecemeal improvements to current tax portfolio - none of it would fix the inertia already priced and baked into the system. |
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| ▲ | larsiusprime 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I prefer sun yat sen’s Land reform ideas to mao’s |
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| ▲ | legitster 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous." > To put it bluntly, it is necessary to create terror for a while in every rural area." Let's not glamourize the Mao's land reforms. It required the killing of 1-2 million people. Even then, the collectivization was a massive failure - not only did the peasantry not get to enjoy the benefits of land reform, a further 15 million people would die from the resulting famine. The deep irony is that Taiwan was actually able to do the same reform but with much better outcomes, with much less loss of life or political violence. |
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| ▲ | dluan 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Taiwan did not have anywhere near the land distribution occur under CKS/CCK, nor the same veracity of landlord clique ownership. And, you're further wrong in that a big part of white terror was specifically due to 外省人 owners of factories and farms, from land stolen from the aborigines. The white terror wasn't by any means less violent and senseless than cultural revolution. |
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| ▲ | applicative 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Solon did this in Athens. The French Revolution did it. They actually maintained it and had historic states with strange liberty. Mao pretended to do it but then introduced the familiar Stalinist collectivization that had killed everyone in Ukraine - as he knew. |
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