I suppose that, if socialism is “monkey-wrenched”, that the next wave will be authoritarian, in any case, if the current trend continues.

Tatyana, This is a recurring theme in your comments. I’ve seen it repeated in your replies to comments and posts.

Are you a genius, or what? Perhaps you know it all. Perhaps you’ve seen it all. (Perhaps you’re half way to being a troll). Good for you.

You have to know the enemy thoroughly, if you’re determined to fight it.

Your idea of “monkeywrenching socialism” is not very attractive, if a familiar one.
I can say that as someone who lived under socialism for 2/3 of my life. That was one of the choices some of us selected – but there is a difference. We already lived UNDER the system, from the day we were born. The range of resistance was much smaller for us – either confirm to the rules and become the biggest cynical head-stepping cad of them all; or to produce tiny squeaks of indignation, either to yourself, reading a piece of coarse propaganda de jour, or sharing it with like-minded individuals (knowing that 50% of whom were snitches) around the kitchen table. That’s the equivalent of what you call “monkeywrnching”, or what we call “a fig in a pocket”: impotent blathering that doesn’t change a thing, only at best turns a few minds off socialistic mindset.

I thought the tradition of freedom in this country allow people to be a bit more powerful that helpless “monkeywrenching”. After all, there are mechanisms here to ensure liberties are not taken off people’s hands. Or are there?

Virgil Xenophon – You live in a city that survives from day to day because the corruption you acquiesce to is not quite bad enough to let the waters come in and wipe out the city. One day they will unless New Orleans gets its act together. You should consider that this situation is not stable as the willingness of others to “pull the wagon” is not infinite. I hope your current governor has success in turning things around. It looks like he wants to.

I also am not going to play I was more oppressed than you so I know better. That too is not a proper comparison. Frankly, I did more work in putting my relatives and family friends back together after they escaped this supposedly non-totalitarian post-stalinist system. That gives me a different perspective, of an EMT more than an accident victim, but that difference in perspective does not invalidate my observations and prescriptions for a cure.

I am open to hearing your testimony and your ideas. I think it would be quite valuable. But if you want a monologue. If you think I have nothing to say to you, then please just do not read what I have to say. It will only make you upset that I do not bow and scrape and say mother-may-I to just about anybody.

In case you’re still reading, The idea that the people are not-quite-human, a lump of clay or a dumb animal, is a part of the mindset that permits the enormities that neither of us would like to see as government policy ever again. By itself, it’s not going to get anybody killed. On the other hand, according basic human respect and decency to all is a barrier to socialist thinking, a barrier that has long been eroded out of convenience by people all along the left-right political spectrum. I’d like that barrier, among many other barriers built up again, alongside the offensive tactics of monkeywrenching that this series will discuss. So I end up a bit pedantic about metaphors. I realize this but just hope it is forgivable.

Gorbanevskaya, Bogoraz and six others – 15 years before they would vanish even before they think up the protest. As millions vanished before them.

What, exactly, you know about going to the Red Square with signs of all kinds? And about living in communal apartments, 1 bdrm per family of 5, for decades? Of waiting for hours in a line for groceries for sister to come from school to take your place – and wait 2 hours more? About necessity of holding one’s tongue instilled in from the age of five? Of drunks vomiting in the stairwell of your apartment block? Of the lying newspapers? Of TV, showing endless footage of “proletarian struggle in countries of Western capitalism”? Of daily “political information hour”, in every workplace and in every school? Of Young Pioneer camps? Of the joy of a pair of new boots (imported from Romania, if extremely lucky)?
About studying till midnight for tens of years – including “scientific communism” and “history of KPSS” subjects, as the only ticket to get you out of the slums – and then to be told after passing the draconian entrance exams into capital’ university that they can’t accept you, not with your[Jewish]last name? Of black market, of nepotism, of hypocrisy, of double-speak, of humiliation of changing one’s child ethnicity for a passport, so he could have better prospect than you? What do you know about all that?

More importantly – do you know about happiness of living that life? Of sudden discovery that your grandparent used to have 5 brothers and sisters – vanished without a trace, with only couple of photographs remaining of their existence, hidden in depths of a home-made sofa? Of neighbors, gratefully repeating every day: “At least we are not in War”? Of gratitude that there are stores, and schools for children and movie theaters you’re allowed to enter and that one could find work, after all – not in anything needing security clearance, of course, but work nevertheless, where they hand you money to live, once a month? About enthusiasm of that life? OF joy, joy of passing, escaping the worse fate – because every family had a dark shadow (not everyone had a closet, so I won’t talk about skeletons); every family had an intimate memory of the times passed.

Nobody who lived that life has any confusion what totalitarianism is. We know the difference; it’s in our bones, in our genes, in our bloodstream.

Don’t you tell me about inappropriateness of my metaphors. I know of what I speak.

You seriously think you can offer something for my education?

Wow.

What you term “show the donkey a carrot” is a cynical, insulting, but not necessarily wrong way of describing capitalism. The technicians talk about incentives instead of carrots and the advocates of the system don’t generally call the people jackasses but that’s not an essential criticism, more a stylistic quibble.

I suggest you compare and contrast the current system in Russia with America’s gilded age. They have remarkable similarities and, hopefully, similar outcomes, the creation of counterbalancing structures that permit the creation of honest fortunes to be made. But this is getting far afield. Socialism is dying in Russia but it’s on the march in the US and in the US we have a problem with effecting a proper reversal without putting blood in the streets at a level nobody wants.

David Foster – I only use flying cars because they represent the extreme possible load on an ATC system, widespread personal air transport. If you can handle that scenario, you have the problem of ATC solved.

You seem to think that the ATC system is improving. You have not provided any evidence for it. In fact, you’ve linked to a testament as to how bad the government system is.

My own observation is that ATC has been and continues to be a limiting factor in normal economic times on the commercial business of flying. The business of the FAA is to provide a framework where safe ATC is not a limiting factor in the air travel sector. They are failing at that business and have been failing at it for decades. Something else might do better. But this is also beside the point.

Defending my particular example is fun but I really would prefer to talk about the general point. Do you think in general that we’re going in a socialist direction (national or internationalist variant) economically and do you agree that we should be reversing that trend in a sustainable way as soon as possible?

Also, I don’t think you can conclude that just because a galactic overhaul of the computer systems has not taken place that no improvements have been made in these systems. It is very often better to improve systems on an evolutionary basis, and the track record of projects with names like “advanced system” and “system X” and “NextGen” is not very good. This is true in business as well as government.

You might be interested in my post the story of a software failure, which is about the attempted implementation of the “advanced automation system” for ATC by the FAA and IBM.

And yes, Tatyana, bankruptcy is exactly the issue.

What all these dreamy, allegedly idealistic fools rushing us toward the corporate state never seem to understand is that the laws of economis don’t go away just because some group of pols can vote themselves all sorts of power over their fellow citizens.

The vast majority of these characters couldn’t manage a corner drugstore or fast food franchise successfully, but, because they’ve been elected or appointed to a political position, suddenly see themselves as skilled and knowledgeable managers of the vast economic entities that statist controls and regulations create.

The advantage of a private system of ownership and control is that bad management may affect companies, or even segments of the economy, if the companies are big and influential enough, but no one entity can tank the whole system.

When you create a corporate state, as any collectivist system does, regardless of how it’s labelled, the political masters become commercial managers, usually without even the most rudimentary experience in that very demanding field. And, then, as the incompetence of these poseurs begins to collapse the economy, you observe the endless parade of scapegoats and “wreckers” and invisible saboteurs trotted out to disguise the responsibity of the pols who actually caused the problem.

The ludicrous sight of Barney Frank or Chris Dodd condemning the greed of the bankers or stockbrokers for the evening news, when their actions were directly responsible for the collapse, and then taking enormous “campaign contributions” from those very same people, is a defining example of the entire problem.

I am looking forward to further installments in this series.

As you said yourself – nomenklatura is alive and well in ex-SU, just changed their colors. Why would they shoot the branch they were comfortably seating on? Just like Lenin in 1921 realized there is nothing to redistribute anymore and announced NEP, to increase the stock of goods to divide later, same was with Gorbachev in 1985. The country had exhausted all their productive resources. There was no right to private property, even to one’s own dwelling; no incentive to work productively. The authorities acknowledged the problem for a long time – they had even introduced a “socialist competition” program (with separate net of professionals running it, a cross of economists and social workers), which rewarded increased production with selection of bonuses and additional benefits, like a discounted cost vacation in a Black Sea resort. That didn’t work either.

The economy of 1/6th of the Earth’ Continents, as propagandists loved to call USSR, was a colossus on crumbling feet. It went bankrupt.

They didn’t need to shoot anyone – all they needed was to show the donkey a carrot of private property (securing the biggest piece of the pie for themselves, of course) – and they were safe forever after.

As for systemic winners, until you’ve run enough iterations, some people will have had their turn as being Paul without ever being Peter. But the socialist system has everybody, even government workers, playing Peter more often than Paul.

Tatyana – The Soviet system ended when the nomenklatura realized that they themselves were losing out. This is why there was precious little need for violence all over the E bloc to get rid of a totalitarian system. Yes, there was a practical test, but the data supports me in the end. Why didn’t the winners fight to suppress the losers? Do you really think that they were too moral to shoot? Have they showed that sort of high moral character in the new Russia? Your thesis has a problem of the missing shooters. The nomenklatura provoked the end of the USSR. The nomenklatura in the form of the siloviki are still in charge. Why would they ever do that that gut wrenching change if they were winners?

Wesley Linder – Unfortunately, the moral objection to impoverishing future generations does not hold a durable electoral majority. My aim is to develop enough alternate motivations so there is a sensible roadmap to the creation of such a durable electoral majority. It’s about winning elections and implementing policies that are better, not worse. We haven’t had that for awhile.

veryretired – as I said in my 8:23a comment we are living in Keynes’ long run. We are all losers based on foregone growth and entire industries strangled in their cribs. Awakening people to the fact that they’re already screwed and that the choice is to either build a better foundation for the next generation or to screw that next generation even more is a major component to breaking the ratchet. But more on the ratchet later.