Interesting topic. I traveled extensively in the former CCCP by car in the late 1980s as a college kid. The things that struck me then:

Large cameras on street corners. I recall looking at those cameras and breathing a sigh of relief--that in America our govt doesn't need cameras on every corner. Look how far we've come now, there are probably more cameras in public here now than ever existed in CCCP.

People were fed censored media. It was difficult to get certain perspectives, the "outside world" was totally different but nobody really seemed to know. State-owned media censored everything. Recall that when Romania fell in 1989, someone delivered a truckload of oranges to Bucharest, and there were people eating them with the peel on. Nobody had seen an orange before. Our media now is similar to the former CCCP, especially in relation to the fact that the entire enterprise is now basically owned by Israel and/or panders to ADL propaganda orders--thus an entire perspective of world events is never mentioned.

I believe that it is all in the economics. I don't look too hard at "corruption," because it is in every government, but it does not account for the vast transfer of wealth that has occurred in the US or in Russia. For that, you need to look at SYSTEMIC problems, and both the US and Russia have them. The fundamental problem is government interference into the marketplace. Welfare programs, fiat money, crushing regulation, and other forms of government intervention into the marketplace disrupt the wealth-creating mechanism that a free market possesses. When you have tens or hundreds of millions of people making the best decision that they can based upon their rational self interest, you are leveraging all of those minds to create vast amounts of wealth. While the most talented people accumulate a lot more wealth than the majority, the overall majority of wealth still ends up evenly distributed in the 80% part of the bell curve. That is already proven. THere are a few people that do way better than everyone else, and a few people that don't do as well, but the engine of prosperity runs efficiently and maximizes the use of resources and capital.

However, when you have institutions like the federal reserve distorting the currency and the investment cycles, massive welfare programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid destroying all voluntary saving, regulations that force people to make choices that they otherwise wouldn't have made, etc, you destroy the cumulative effect of all of those minds - because they are no longer choosing freely based upon their rational self interest.

Each govt intervention represents the government using the threat of violence to FORCE buyers or sellers (or both) to make decisions that they otherwise wouldn't make. In an environment like ours today, where government - or that threat of violence - pervades every aspect of economic life, there is no way to call it capitalism any longer. It DOES effectively take the reduced overall output and divert it to the few who are ruthless enough to plunder it. No longer are the richest people the richest because they provided the market with the best products, but they are the richest because they are well connected.

While this is not the case for 100% of all sectors of our economy, these are the forces at work in both the US and Russia (and every other industrial nation) right now. The US moved away from capitalism toward this fascism, and Russia and China came from the other direction to move away from Communism toward this fascism. All of the world governments seem to think this is the place to be.

However, the market makes no compromises. It is total, real freedom or the market is going to punish you in the end. None of the "mixed economies" are sustainable. They have all been declining since the day they introduced the threat of violence into the market as a "solution." Once free choice is corrupted, distortions appear that eventually grow into systemic failure, like a cancer. Hopefully, there will be some opportunity to make the great majority of people see this, because right now they are drinking large draughts of the government Kool Aid that these problems are a failure of capitalism.

Tom Mullen

www.tommullen.net
www.myspace.com/skepticsongs

"Question with boldness even the existence of a God" - Thomas Jefferson

A definition of totalitarianism from Wikipedia:

"Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is a concept used to describe political systems where a state regulates nearly every aspect of public and private life. The term is usually applied to Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Shōwa Japan or communist states, such as the Stalinist-USSR, Democratic Kampuchea, Vietnam, Mao-era and modern China and North Korea. Totalitarian regimes or movements maintain themselves in political power by means of an official all-embracing ideology and propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that controls the state, personality cults, central state-controlled economy, regulation and restriction of free discussion and criticism, the use of mass surveillance, and widespread use of terror tactics."

We are far from there, although arguably there are some similarities and we may be headed in that direction.

You are correct to point out that the Russians have allowed themselves to end up in this situation, that they actually vote for these tyrants, perhaps because of their culture that has been shaped by generations of oppression, and does not value individual liberty. Russia is an example of how nothing can be accomplished in the way of liberty without a majority of the citizens understanding the value of freedom.

I think that the natural progression when you are growing up is first, in childhood, to respect parental authority, and then in adolescence to question that authority and start thinking for yourself. So people are equipped with both the need for an authority figure and (if they are allowed to mature normally) a desire for freedom. Every child is born with the potential to want liberty, but it if they never get to mature psychologically, if there is always a state there to tell them what to do and take care of them, that potential never realizes itself.

In a sense I think Russians have been prevented from maturing to the point that they want the freedom to take care of themselves and their own families. The men especially, since women are by nature fierce protectors of their children, and that instinct is very difficult to eradicate. Russian women complain that the men make terrible husbands, and these women are falling over each other to meet American men through internet dating services (apparently).

I would like Americans to understand that this state of infancy is not cool. It is shameful, in fact. There are some ways in which our culture still values freedom and independence. We like our rebel heroes in the movies, for example, and I think in many homes across the country there still exists a profound distrust of government. I am beginning to be more and more convinced that public schools play a central part in convincing people to accept the idea that the state knows best. I am trying to think of ways that we could reach children with our message of liberty, because I think they desperately need another perspective.

Fortunately for us, freedom is just viscerally appealing-- but the danger is that people may become used to experiencing it only in the realm of fantasy (eg. video games) and will be content to live without it in real life...