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Thursday, October 27, 2005 - 4:02pmSanction this postReply
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Thanks for this refreshing commentary refuting the cliche' favored by both the Left and the Right, that the USSR fell because of US foreign policy. The thumbsucking bawlers on the Left complain bitterly that their utopian schemes--in Russia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Chili, or whereever--fail because of blackhearted and unfair meddling by the US state.  The misty-eyed war worshippers on the Right crow endlessly about how the Soviet Union was supposedly brought down by the Reagan defense buildup. They imagine that the Soviet state was exhausted and demoralized by military competition with the supposedly invincible American military machine, so that Soviet planners, normally ten feet tall, were thereby forced to their knees.

The perspectives of big government Leftists and big government Rightists share a similar outlook. In each case, these ideologues believe without understanding that their particular brand of political collectivism and state planning is efficacious and just; if only the political class will impose appropriate coercive measures, then justice will naturally assert itself. The Left believes natural justice requires the imposition of socialism; the Right believes justice requires the imposition of American military hegemony in virtually any foreign theater.

Neither outlook is congruent with individualism--the right to exercise one's mind and abilties in pursuit of one's happiness. Neither outlook is congruent with reason, which is why both Left and Right persist in telling lies, twisting facts, and rewriting history in defense of their particular brand of state power.


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Thursday, October 27, 2005 - 5:43pmSanction this postReply
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Nice vignette, Tibor.

This whole thing about "socialism would have succeeded if it hadn't been for those pesky Americans" is, of course, tiresome & pathetic.

But you can see the psychological roots of it.

To quote Mises, socialism is "nothing but a grandiose rationalization of petty resentments".

The mindset of resentment, victimhood, paranoia & bitterness drives the whole sorry socialist lie. They'll never get it. That's why they turned to environmentalism. Hence the tactics of the neo-Fabians: creeping statism under the guise of "third way" politics, political correctness, & cultural & moral relativism.

JKG may have belatedly admitted the failure of socialism but like all his concrete-bound ilk could only see it pragmatically, in hindsight, after so much cruelty & suffering.

Ross



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Thursday, October 27, 2005 - 5:54pmSanction this postReply
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Tibor-

I agree that socialism due to it's very nature is guaranteed to fail.  I agree that America did not prevent the U.S.S.R from succeeding, but I also have to note that it's natural demise was augmented by America and that America limited the wake of it's destruction.  Without America, how much longer would this demise have taken and how many more victims would it have claimed?


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Thursday, October 27, 2005 - 6:30pmSanction this postReply
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Well, that's right, Jody. Adding to an adversary's downfall is not quite the same as preventing him from fighting.

And, yes, the existence of a strong, semi-capitalist West prevented a horrible extension of suffering both within the Soviet Union & it's satellites. Witness former East Germany which after a trillion dollars of former West German aid is still a backwater. It could have been much worse.

[or perhaps that's just another argument for non-intervention. Would former East Germany have fared better *without* the assistance of Bonn?]

Another, more frightening spectre, was that a corrupt state like the USSR may have decided to go out in blaze of nuclear glory or devolved into civil war. If memory serves correct, it looked like the later was a distinct possibility at one point.

Once again, if not for America...

Ross

NB: hard to believe it was all of 15 years ago.
(Edited by Ross Elliot
on 10/27, 6:31pm)


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Thursday, October 27, 2005 - 8:31pmSanction this postReply
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What about all of the moral arguments that Reagan made against Communism in his speeches and radio addresses?

What about: "Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down this wall?"

Never happened?

Had no effect?


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Thursday, October 27, 2005 - 10:25pmSanction this postReply
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Jason, I can't speak for Tibor but the import of his article (and Mises' entire thesis) is that socialism is an untenable, self-defeating proposition. My comments also added that socialists have always whined & blamed others when their irrational methods fail.

Reagan, Rand, et al, gave *us* hope & courage. And yes, that may have lead to a quickening of the USSR's spectacular denouement, but in all essentials, socialism was doomed the moment Marx dreamed it up.

Ross
(Edited by Ross Elliot
on 10/27, 10:26pm)


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Friday, October 28, 2005 - 5:49amSanction this postReply
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Tibor,

Apparently you do not understand what the grand strategy of the U.S. was during the Cold War.  It was containment of the Soviet Union until it rotted from the inside out.  You complain that the U.S. did not militarily support the Hungarian rebellion in 1956.  Of course not.  That would have led to world war and probably an exchange of nuclear weapons.  The whole point of containment was to defeat the Soviet Union without wholesale slaughter and megadeaths.

Moreover, the Reagan administration executed the final phase of the containment strategy beautifully.  It starved the Soviet Union of the hard currency it needed to purchase technology to beef up its war machine by forcing the Saudis to flood the world market with crude oil.  (The sale of crude was the Soviet Union's primary source of hard currency.)  It then emasculated the Soviet nuclear threat against U.S. cities in the event of a war in Europe by deploying the Pershing missiles in the U.K. and Germany.  Then it began an arms race the Soviets knew they would lose with the Strategic Defense Initiative.  Those were the sticks.

Reagan also put out the carrots to exploit the Soviet Union's desire to play on the world stage as a "normal" country.  The Soviet Union was failing and Reagan knew this.  The only way the regime could sustain itself was to integrate the Soviet Union with the rest of the world.  But doing that would mean an amelioration of the communist regime.  So Reagan encouraged that process, and the Soviet Union eventually produced a leader like Gorbyachev who was not evil enough to use military force to hold the Soviet empire together when its contradictions finally caused it to fall apart.

The Cold War was a long and grueling contest that last nearly a half century.  Americans paid a huge price for that war.  We ended up with a centralized welfare state that we cannot seem to get rid of.  However, the Cold War was not a dead loss for us.  We won, and our victory was relatively bloodless compared to the fifty million people slaughtered during the short years of World War II.

Andy


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Friday, October 28, 2005 - 8:38amSanction this postReply
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"Apparently you do not understand what the grand strategy of the U.S. was during the Cold War. It was containment of the Soviet Union until it rotted from the inside out."

That's odd. My memory of the cold war was that our own economics professors [most of them] were comparing the soviet economic system favorably with respect to the United States. Everyone, except the Austrians, couldn't have been been more surprised at the economic collapse of the Soviet Union.

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Friday, October 28, 2005 - 9:50amSanction this postReply
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I quite agree, Mike - especially in the light of the revealed information after the fall...

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Friday, October 28, 2005 - 8:58pmSanction this postReply
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Guys,

The reason it took so many decades for the Soviet Union to fall was that we kept propping it up through government-to-government loans, through technology transfer, through sale of industrial capital equipment, through purchasing their raw materials (oil), and sometimes by outright grants or transfer of material goods. Reagan didn't completely stop that, but he at least deregulated the oil market which led to falling prices that, as Andy pointed out, wiped out most of their foreign cash income.

There were a lot of other actors at the time who had their own parts to play in the drama, but they have largely gone unsung.

-Bill

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Saturday, October 29, 2005 - 3:36amSanction this postReply
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Gentlemen,

The Truman Doctrine was no secret.  The fact that it was not perfectly executed over the course of four decades and that economic professors in academia didn't have a clue doesn't diminish the overall effectiveness of our deliberate policy of containment.  We had a plan for winning the Cold War and it worked.

Andy


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Saturday, October 29, 2005 - 10:17amSanction this postReply
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Sir,

I accidentally sanctioned your last post. I am actually quite skeptical of your analysis:

http://skepdic.com/posthoc.html

I believe the Soviet Union failed because totalitarianism de-motivates the individuals that have to endure them to such an extent that their economies cannot prosper. I believe they would have failed sooner if the west had not "propped them up" via having markets that actually worked that they were able in some fashion to participate in.
(Edited by Mike Erickson on 10/29, 3:33pm)


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Saturday, October 29, 2005 - 2:17pmSanction this postReply
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Mike,

Read "The Gulag Archipelago" and you'll learn how the Soviet Union kept its economy stumbling forward.

Andy


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Saturday, October 29, 2005 - 3:34pmSanction this postReply
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Andy,

I was an avid reader of Solzhenitsyn perhaps 25 years ago. I haven't forgotten his vivid picture of life and death in the Soviet prison system. Or the purpose of it. Read any of the first hand accounts of the Chernobyl disaster for even more insight into the workings of Soviet "management" and how fear of authority creates incompetence at all levels.

If anything, this supports Dr. Machen's thesis.

Mike E.

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