Jan 15, 2020, 8:51 AM
—” (with irony) Today’s Youth explains that the economic failures of communism didn’t have much to do with the Soviet Union’s demise.”—Steve Sailer @Steve_Sailer
The Soviets used the fact that Russians had been serfs only decades before – and most still lived like serfs – and migrated them to a militarized labor force – saving the cost of market prices for labor, redirecting that savings to the funding commons. Then the people adapted to incentives: black markets in all. They reverted to serf behavior: minimum production. But Soviet education, science, and commons production were far ahead of USA’s. The error is probably on both sides in that the market and private production are optimums for the middle and up, and non-market for physical commons better for working-class and down: serving each other. We (economists) know perfectly well why the socialist and communist systems don’t and can’t ever work: (a) incentives produce declines in production in exchange for increases in corruption free riding and rent. (b) economic calculation of investment is impossible. ( c) “Humans”. We can end the monopoly(equality) presumption of the economy. Historically we used barbarian > “slave” > serf > freeman > citizen > sovereign, as progressions of market independence (not power). We don’t think of these as different economies, but they were. We need 3+ economies. We’ve tried to force too many people at the bottom into the middle class because that was the reason for european success – culling the lower classes. We’ve bred and imported vast underclasses undermining european market majoritarianism. And we’ve recreated demand for “serfdom”. There are plenty of people who would exchange voting rights for economic dependency and some sort of equality while maintaining access to the goods and services produced by market goods.