The Lonely Conservative has dug up an interesting article by Yuri N. Maltsev via American Thinker, called “The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union. Maltsev is a noted Russian Economist. The intro from AT;
Maltsev was an economist in the former USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is more than qualified to speak on the subject and has written at length about the millions of people killed by the communist regime of the former USSR. He served in the 1980s, during the perestroika unwinding of the Soviet Union. He witnessed the bodies piling up to the sky under the poisonous and brutal left-wing scheme of central planning. In an amazing and insightful article from mises.org, Maltsev offers his definitive, argument shattering analysis:
“…..the primary problem in the Soviet Union was socialism, and it is still far from being dismantled in the nations that once made up that evil empire.”
To recap, everyone who reads this needs to read Yuri Maltsev’s article that is available through mises.org. Maltsev was a witness, as the red machinery of communism ground up human bodies in the millions. He has an amazing, story to tell, backed up by numbers and figures, and his expert insight as an economist of the Soviet Union. He gives definitive proof that the USSR was indeed the “evil empire” that Ronald Reagan referred to, and the article serves as a strong rebuke to the liberals who contend that America was the true bad guy during the Cold War. When I think of the leftists taking ideological arms against Reagan’s stance in the Cold War, the term “useful idiot” starts ringing in my mind.
From the first paragraph of Maltsev’s essay;
Lenin’s slogan, “Marxism is Almighty Because It Is True,” was displayed practically everywhere in the former Soviet Union. My first encounter with Karl Marx came in the first grade of elementary school in the city of Kazan on the banks of the great Volga River. Hispicture was printed on the first page of the first textbook I opened. “Dedushka Marx” (Grandfather Marx), said the teacher pointing to the picture. I was thrilled, for both of my grandfathers died in Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. I ran home to my grandma to tell her she was wrong. “I have a grandpa,” I said, and with his huge beard and smiling eyes, “he looks like Father Frost” (the Soviet/atheist version of Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of Russia).
This next paragraph is very important…read it two or three times to get the full import;
One of the common denominators between Leninists and government interventionists in the West is the belief that the problems of monopoly are the problems of ownership: only private monopolies acting out of greed are harmful. These institutions are suppressing scientific and technical progress, polluting the environment, and engaging in other conspiracies against public well-being. Government monopolies, however, were believed to be ethical and upright; they substituted the “greed” ofthe profit motive with a “societal interest.” Yet group bureaucrats who manage and operate the public sector are no less self-interested than those who manage and operate private business. One important difference exists, though: unlike private entrepreneurs, they are not financially responsible for their actions and they operate without institutional constraints of cost control that private property and competition induces. The enlightened minds of planners and technocrats cannot overcome the problem of economic calculation without market signals.
These next two paragraphs are also important in that they explain that the people who pushed Marxism the most, didn’t really believe in it, but used it as a means to an end, which was the gathering of power to control other people’s lives;
The failure of socialism in Russia, and the enormous suffering and hardship of people in all socialist countries, is a powerful warning against socialism, statism, and interventionism in the West. “We should all be thankful to the Soviets,” says Paul Craig Roberts, “because they have proved conclusively that socialism doesn’t work. No one can say they didn’t have enough power or enough bureaucracy or enough planners or they didn’t go far enough.”[2]
In contrast to the West, where Marxist tenets were doctrines of a counterreligion, few in the Soviet Union truly believed in the official ideology: not the state managers, not the professors, not the journalists.[3] It was not necessary that they do so, for Marxism was a means of political rent seeking and of coercive control, not a body of ideas held to by honest men. ( emphasis mine)
Before Communism/Socialism took over in Russia, they were a major exporter of grains, much like the United States is/was now. With the government demanding more and more grain for the production of the worthless fuel additive, Ethanol, are we now on our way to being like modern Russia, an importer of grain? According to the latest data available, the US imported almost three million metric tons of coarse grains. We used to be the bread basket of the world. Are we losing that distinction?
The crisis in socialist agriculture goes back to the 1920s and ’30s, when millions of the most productive peasant households were branded as “kulaks,” and exiled to Siberia. Most of them could not survive the hardships and purges and perished there. Agriculture still has not recovered from this collectivization and blanket nationalization of property that turned owners into prison laborers. At the beginning of the century, Russia exported wheat, rye, barley, and oats to the world market. Today Russia is the world’s largest importer of grain.
What it all boils down to is that the Socialist model has been tried for almost a century…that’s one hundred years for some of the math illiterates out there…and has been proven not to work. Why then, does Obama and his cadre of Socialist advisors think that they will be the ones to make it work? There must be some kind of hypnotic phrase in the manifesto that followers repeat to themselves over and over that makes them believe in such tripe.
The essay is long, but worth the read
Posted by thatmrgguy 
‘Dangerous’: Police have told villagers that wire mesh protecting their windows could hurt burglars and lead to lawsuits
