Lucianne.com links to an unusual source - Gateway Hispanic - which carries an article reporting efforts by supposedly Communist Vietnam to emulate the government streamlining pioneered by Javier Milei in Argentina. In passing it notes the incoming Trump administration plans to do likewise.
Communists are supposed to love government planning above all else, so how to understand this move by Vietnam? The other DrC and I have visited Vietnam and I’ll report what we saw and experienced which tend to support what the article claims.
On our visit to Vietnam several years ago we saw lots of communist sloganeering - billboards and banners - alongside what was obviously rampant capitalism in action. Lots of gold stars on scarlet backgrounds and socialist realism posters, yes. Also everyone mounted on a lite motorcycle with their entire family hanging on for dear life, thousands of small businesses everywhere, and little evidence of regimentation or standardization.
As a retired business school prof I pay attention to economic activity in a place I visit. Virtually every new house being built had a shop on the ground floor with living quarters above. If the builder didn’t intend to be a shopkeeper himself he planned to rent it to someone who wanted a place of business, making him a landlord.
It was very clear that whatever government slogans were being mouthed, the people were culturally capitalists and getting on with their businesses. We also experienced some of this in 1980s China.
So whatever Marx and Mao said and wrote, the people of Asia have a seemingly quite strong sense of doing business and getting ahead that likely dates back centuries. The former Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, is a teeming, sweltering place with thousands of motorbikes put-putting every which way. And shops large and small everywhere you look.
I suspect the Vietnamese used the Communists’ sense of organization to help them get the foreigners to leave and are now honoring that “dictatorship of the proletariat” ideology more in the breach than in actuality. They understand neighbor China is a bigger threat than the far off U.S., and are among those contesting China’s attempts at hegemony in the greater South China Sea.
So yes, I can imagine Vietnam discovering the bureaucrats cost more than they were worth (certainly true here) and made doing everything much harder than it needed to be (ditto). Some regulation is necessary but it is easily overdone and should be kept to a minimum. Human beings thrive better when largely responsible for their own outcomes - good and bad.
