The natural state of affairs...

A friend sent me an interesting email today. It was an account from a Vanderbilt University Divinity School Professor, Fernando F. Segovia, who returned to Cuba after more than 40 years. His touching account about what he found there and what he thinks will happen WHEN the regime falls can be found at www.vanderbilt.edu/alumni/publications/40yearslater.pdf . Please read the whole article. It has great photos.

One of the lines that stuck with me was the following:

To me this was a supremely tired people, ideologically devastated, looking for exits, from the informational to the symbolic to the supernatural. A people, I observed, ready to move onward.

Can you imagine living in a system in which everything is a battle? Everything you want to do requires a herculean effort. The most basic freedoms denied. I started to think of the strains the Cuban economic system puts on the people. People often ask what will happen WHEN the regime collapses. In a certain sense, economically, nothing will happen. What I mean is nothing will happen that will require anyone to do anything planned. Because capitalism is the natural state of affairs. You can build a house in the everglades. You can spend all day fixing and painting it and keeping the animals at bay. But leave that house abandoned for a few months and nature takes itss course. The swamp will reclaim the house. In Cuba's case the people are tired of painting and fixing up this old house. It would just be much better to let nature take over. Capitalism can't be killed. Every planned economy in the history of the world has had a robust black market. That's the beauty of capitalism. It takes no centrally coordinated effort or planning. It just IS. Adam Smith decribed this invisible hand perfectly in the The Wealth of Nations more than 225 years ago.

After communism, capitalism will be a breeze. Kind of like Ty Cobb wearing weighted shoes in his everyday life so he could feel lighter on his feet during the games.