Freedom still works! From Jon Miltmore at jjmilt.substack.com:
Over the last 35 years, Vietnam has undergone one of the most miraculous economic transformations in history. So how was it achieved?
Phung Xuan Vu was just eight years old when he accompanied his brother to the food distribution center. His belly hurt from hunger, and he was anxious—filled with worry that he would lose his food voucher or be chastened by the officials distributing food.
“The officials were not friendly. They were bossy and had power,” Vu recalled decades later. “We felt that we had to beg for food that was rightfully ours.”
Vu’s family was poor, but not by local standards. They owned a bicycle, something not all families in Vietnam could say. Yet waiting for hours for food was difficult.
In the book The Bridge Generation of Viet Nam: Spanning Wartime to Boomtime, Vu recalled how schoolchildren, weak and thirsty, would wait hours on end in the heat for food rations only to get cheated by officials, who would mix rocks in with the rice to fool the scales.
“That made us angry, but we could not fight or argue with the officials,” Vu told authors Nancy Napier and Dau Thuy Ha. “What could we do, as children?”
How Vietnam Became the Poorest Country in the World
Vietnam is a country most people know, but for many the knowledge of its history stops in 1975 — the year Saigon fell, two years after the withdrawal of US troops.
Banishing the New Man workers utopia to the trash heap is how you overcome the default setting of manboons.