"Alright, Dena." Scrooge smiled confidently, "I have many schemes to destroy your country. Yes, it's a conspiracy, not a conspiracy, so even if I tell you now, there's not much you can do. ”

"First of all, the most immediate must be military preparations, the whole of Europe will be on your side, and can continue to deter you through those proxies that border you, so that you have to invest huge manpower and material resources in the military field, and thus drag down your industrial development and people's livelihood. As you know, there have been many things that have arisen in this war that will profoundly change the situation of the war. But because of the backwardness of technology, Russia did not master such technology, coupled with the destruction of the civil war itself, plus the fact that, well, Dena, most of the people in Russia who have the opportunity to get a good education are your class enemies. A few of them may be willing to side with you, but most will be on your side. So your technical prowess is quite poor, even worse than the original Tsarist Russia. This means that you will be followers of the revolution in military technology for a long time. Do you understand the dilemmas this will cause you? ”

"We need to devote a considerable amount of resources from our already extremely tight resources to education and scientific research, and we have to invest more than them in order to catch up with other countries in Europe that are already ahead of us. However, our system has the advantage that we can allocate various resources in a unified manner, and it will be more efficient. Dena replied.

"It's not just that." Scrooge sneered and said, "In order to protect yourself, you need to maintain a relatively large army, and because of the backwardness of technology, you need to have a numerical advantage to maintain the balance of military power." This means that you will have to equip a lot of weapons, even if they are already outdated. And once there is a new development in weapons, all the things that you have been equipped with with great difficulty will become waste, and then you need to invest more resources to keep up with the progress of military equipment on the one hand, and on the other hand, until the new equipment is developed, you will not only not be able to reduce the number of outdated weapons, but even increase them, so as to ensure that this window will not be used by the enemy. And when you develop new weapons, and you have to re-equip them on a large scale, then a new generation of your enemies will come out...... As a result, you will continue to spin in a cycle of mass production of outdated weapons to maintain balance. ”

Seeing that Dena seemed to want to refute, Scrooge hurriedly made a gesture and said, "Dena, don't rush yet, let me finish first." I know you're trying to say that it's just a technical problem and that there's always a solution. Indeed, if you're lucky, for example, if you're in a country with an economic crisis, you can buy machinery and technology at a fairly cheap price. There is a good chance that this will be true. But on the other hand, it also means that war is approaching and your economic development will certainly be interrupted. But that's not the worst thing. These are minor problems compared to the real ones. ”

"And Uncle Scrooge, what is the real problem you are talking about?" Dena asked.

"It's your own internal loss of control." Scrooge said, "Don't laugh, Dena, don't you realize the seriousness of the problem?" Well, so let's get into a few basic assumptions before we get into that. First of all, there are individuals who betray their own interests, and there are no classes that betray their own interests. Dena, I changed the class to the class here, because there are still conflicts of interest within the same class. For example, the petty bourgeoisie and I are almost a life-and-death relationship; And the relationship between the workers' aristocracy and the ordinary workers is not necessarily harmonious. Of course, there is a difference between intra-class contradictions and class contradictions, and at least there is room for reconciliation. Well, what do you think of this hypothesis? ”

Dena didn't answer right away, she knew that this thing that Scrooge threw out was not easy to admit immediately, and there might be many, many traps or something.

"Dena, do you remember the story I told you about the blind man touching the elephant before?" Scrooge continues, "Every blind man, trapped in his or her own perception of the world, can only draw such false conclusions. In fact, when facing the whole world, each of us is blind, and our life experiences, our education, our technical abilities, all of them limit how and how we can see elephants. So although there are exceptions, people with similar life experiences have similar views on the same things, and you can't disagree with that. Most people of the same class, even if they are trapped in their horizons without regard for conscience or other ridiculous things, will have similar views and attitudes. Therefore, each class will naturally defend its own interests, and will strive to maximize their own interests, which has nothing to do with morality, which is determined by their lives. I think this assumption should be relatively reliable. Scrooge continued.

"Well, I agree with that assumption for now." Dena replied that she was also interested in what Scrooge could derive from this hypothesis.

"That's good. Then I have a second hypothesis based on my observations of the world. "Economic activity has become more and more complex, and this complexity stems from the increasingly detailed division of labor in society." I think that with the development of productive forces, the division of labor in society will always be more complex than it is now, and at the same time, the interdependence of various industries will become stronger. From this phenomenon, I put forward the following hypothesis: the coordination of social production is becoming more and more complex, so that the coordination of social production itself has become an industry, and it is an industry with very high technical difficulties and very high thresholds. With the continuous development of social productivity, many people, or most people who are not in this industry, find it more and more difficult to understand the situation of this industry, and later, even if all the information is made public to him, he may not understand the significance and possible impact of each initiative. ”

Dena frowned, she had already vaguely sensed what Scrooge was trying to say, and she even rushed to her own body began to tremble a little uncontrollably, so she had to hold the arm of the chair tightly with her hand.

"In a socialist country, an important task of the state apparatus is to coordinate production between the various industries." Scrooge continued, "I can use the analogy that a socialist country is like a large corporation in which the equity of this large corporation belongs to all its members, and each member has an inherently equal share, in other words, it means that the shareholding of the large corporation is highly dispersed. On the other hand, the operational coordination of this large company relies heavily on the command of its managers. Dena, tell me, what kind of problems would exist in such a large company? ”

"What kind of problems can arise in such a large company?" Dena couldn't help but think, "Such a big company...... Who else in this company can limit the managerial level......"

"The biggest problem in this large company is that the owner will completely lose the power to restrain the operator." Scrooge didn't wait for Dena to answer, and threw out such a cold answer.

"This is not a problem that can be solved by the shareholders' meeting, first of all, every employee is very tired and very tired. Dena, I think you understand, because if every employee or owner is a little more leisurely, you will be crushed by the enemy from the outside. So, they can't help but be tired, not tired. At the same time, coordinating production is so complex that these shareholders have neither the knowledge nor the ability or the time to read the company's various statements. The operation of the company has become a de facto black box for them. Because they don't understand this at all, although in the system, these employee shareholders have the power to manage the company and remove those managers, but in fact, they simply do not have the ability to enforce such power. As a result, the managerial class becomes de facto the controller of the company.

However, this is not the worst thing, the most important thing is that the interests of the managers are not naturally completely aligned with the interests of the company. The company is not his, he is just the operator. Returning to our first assumption, any class will naturally be loyal to its own interests. Managers are no exception, and they will use all kinds of means to ensure that their interests are maximized. Even at the expense of the company. For example, if the normal income of the company's managers is one, let the company go bankrupt, and in the process embezzle the company's assets is two, or even twenty, the return of the managerial class is almost inevitable. Anyway, as long as you can make yourself rich at the company's funeral, it's enough. ”

Speaking of which, Scrooge suddenly remembered some interesting phenomena he had seen before the crossing. In another time and space, when the financial crisis broke out in 2008, the CEOs of some companies that were on the verge of bankruptcy did not hurry to find a way to save the company, but quickly found a way to pay themselves high bonuses, or sold the company's assets to other companies at a low price to get more returns, (of course, in the United States, it is a crime to give money directly, but it is legal to hire someone to be a consultant, and how much to pay the consultant, that is completely the freedom of the enterprise.) For example, the CEO of a company gave himself hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses in one go before he went bankrupt to reward himself for his contributions to the company over the years. Anyway, because of the dispersion of shares, the shareholders' meeting or anything cannot form a resolution at all. And in December 1991, the managers of a super large company directly divided the company. Then these managers immediately became oligarchs with a lot of money, and their feat of making a fortune at the funeral of the company they ran also became an example for countless people to learn from later.