>>I can't imagine anybody made money investing in the old USSR (from within) and I expect that reality to dawn on Americans, perhaps too late,
Andrei Navrozov daringly escaped the Soviet Union in the late 70s and came to the US, that shining city on the hill, beacon of liberty to the world. He found a home in academia and publishing. By the early 90s he concluded that the US was arriving at the same destination as the USSR, but by vastly different means.
The nomenklatura made bundles of money in the old USSR, just as the new nomenklatura in Russia is becoming astoundingly wealthy. The Nazis in Germany and corporatists in Italy made a bargain with industry: the state would suppress the trade unions in exchange for "co-operation". The shareholders of Krupp and IG Farben did well until the post-war reprisal by the Allied victors stripped them of their wealth.
In 1936, the Italian social critic Gaetano Salvemini (with Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, essential reading for our age, IMO) observed, "it is the state, i.e., the taxpayer, who has become responsible to private enterprise. In Fascist Italy the state pays for the blunders of private enterprise."
And today, in the US, that closing world we once called free, how many industries receive tax abatements, TIFs, tax credits, or outright subsidies from one governmental entity or another? The insights we have gleaned from the failed authoritarian states of the past are that we must put everyone on the dole queue, and save our bullets for foreigners. |
