I visited Hungary and Yugoslavia before the "Wall" came down and vividly recall the gray depression that hung everywhere. From bland muted clothing fashions to people's cheerless dispositions. And the scarcity of consumer amenities made me feel wealthy.
The American - Journal of the American Enterprise Institute
Marion Tupy
November 7, 2009
...
In spite of its monumental failure to bring social peace and material
abundance, socialism is enjoying something of a renaissance. From
Venezuela to Bolivia to South Africa, government ministers espouse the
supposed virtues of socialism. Even in the West, some policies are
taking government intervention in the economy to levels unseen in
decades. Given the renewed interest in alternatives to capitalism, it
is perhaps appropriate to recall the last time that socialism was tried
with real gusto.
...
If it is hard to describe the economic wasteland of Russia to someone
who hasn’t been there, it is even harder to describe what their
totalitarian system has done to the human spirit … It isn’t just the
drabness and grayness one sees everywhere. Or the rudeness and
surliness one encounters so often. It’s that you virtually never see
people laughing, smiling, or just seeming to enjoy themselves. People
seem to walk slightly bent over, their eyes always averting a stranger.
There is an overwhelming sense of oppression and depression.
As the Austrian philosopher Friedrich von Hayek explained in his 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom,
central planning leads to massive inefficiencies and long queues
outside empty shops. A state of perpetual economic crisis then leads to
calls for more planning. But economic planning is inimical to freedom.
As there can be no agreement on a single plan in a free society, the
centralization of economic decision-making has to be accompanied by
centralization of political power in the hands of a small elite. When,
in the end, the failure of central planning becomes undeniable,
totalitarian regimes tend to silence the dissenters—sometimes through
mass murder.
Some 100 million people have died in the pursuit of a communist utopia.
Eliminating profit and private property was meant to end social ills,
such as inequality, racism, and sexism. But the closer a society got to
Marxism—whether it was half-hearted attempt as in Hungary or a
whole-hearted attempt as in Cambodia—the bloodier the result. Survival
in a communist society necessitated lies, theft, and betrayal. Thus, as
the former Czech President Vaclav Havel wrote, most people in the
former Soviet bloc grew up without a moral compass. These morally
compromised survivors of communism find it difficult to reflect on the
past and to come to terms with it.
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