Asymmetrical Information

Poland's having trouble. Growth has

Poland's having trouble. Growth has slowed, and now people, threatened with unemployment (my Polish coworker claims it's 35% in some areas), they're looking to statism to bail them out.

The problem with this is that it doesn't work. As this moving article points out, the drive to industrialize the Soviet union used, at one point, 20% of the workforce as slave labor. The other countries that have managed to improve their standards of living significantly through statism were either using massive technology transfer from the West (if you're an agrarian country with $100 per capita GDP, the only way to go is up), or massive financial transfer from the Soviet Union. Scandinavia, which is usually cited as the evidence that social democracy breeds success, doesn't work either; Norway is surviving on its natural resources, not its productivity, and Sweden seems to have been cannibalizing its earlier free market revolution. If Poland re-nationalizes, the evidence says they'll have slower growth. And they'll have no one to blame but themselves.