t best, made more so by the granting of government trade rights to select merchants, trade rights granted by virtue of "connections" or profitability to the Crown specifically, not to the nation as a whole. Efficiency and fair practice were not considerations in the equation. Nor was it limited to foreign exchange: mercantilist reasoning motored the British "enclosure" laws that enabled the feudal nobility-cum-Age of Enlightenment mercantilists to convert their lands into profitable wool "factories" at the expense of the dispossessed peasantry and to the detriment of the nation's food-producing capabilities (Lekachman and Van Loon 38-41). The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s was one disastrous result of such policy. Restricted by law from growing any food produce for themselves save potatoes, over one million Irish peasants died when a blight destroyed their staple crop for several years in a row; there was no shortage of food on the island, but the governing British rulers had designated the other foodstuffs for export (McKay, Hill and Buckler 780-782).
Such government policy has been replicated in the 20th Century by the "anti-capitalist" policies of such "socialist democracies" as the now-defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Beginning with the Russian Revolution of 1917, the U.S.S.R. was founded upon "communist" ideals that combined the politics of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" with economic policy based upon ideals of socialism as formulated by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the mid-1800s (Smith and Evans 11-29). "Socialism," per se, positions government involvement in a nation's economy in terms of social welfare; i.e., the government owns and operates certain key sectors of a country's economy in order to provide an equitable base of health, education and economic opportunity to the general population. The bastardization of Marxist sociology into Soviet communism is a subject in itself; it is enough to...