the disaster which followed the end of the USSR made me a lot more dubious about libertarianism

Statists oversee the wholesale looting of a country after communism on the way to a massively corrupt state that has absolutely no libertarians or libertarian principles and libertarianism gets blamed. Awesome, Nancy. The state is screwing us, which is why we need the state for protection!

I’m off to slap Regis Philbin because I have poison ivy. Makes a bit more sense.

Obviously, there is no way to learn whether things actually got worse when communism ended by appeals to your feelings about communism or communists, or whether they *should* have gotten better, or whether the communists were bloody-handed bastards. The only way to learn those things is to look for data.

The first guard looked at him and said, “I know our orders are to enforce the 10 PM curfew, but he still had five minutes.”

The second guard replied, “I know where he lives. He wouldn’t have made it.”

And where did anyone suggest that? Oh, that’s right, no one suggested that. I, in fact, explicitly disavowed that, expecting that someone would falsely claim I was suggesting that.

What has Russia to do with libertarianism, and what has libertarianism ever had to do with anything that has ever happened or even come close to happening in Russia?

If a man quit a 3-pack a day cigarette habit in favor of smoking massive cigars after every meal, then turned up with cancer a few years later, would that make you “a lot more dubious about” smoking cessation?

Of course that analogy isn’t quite fair, since there are many more differences between cigarettes and cigars than there are between late Soviet communism and present-day Putinian fascism.

Multiple reports written by skeptics who had been to the USSR asserted that the Soviet economic statistics were a fairly transparent tissue of lies. Robert Heinlein went so far as to strongly suggest that even the Soviet population statistics were pigswill.

I have no doubt that Yeltsin’s crew were crooks. Dishonesty and corruption are Russian governmental traditions going back at least to the Mongol conquest in the 13th Century. But to suppose that a restoration of Communism would accomplish anything good – in an economic sense – requires complete lapse of common sense, or so it seems to me.

I think Rothbard had some comments about how to transition from state-capitalism to free markets. Kevin Carson has discussed this issue repeatedly. Geolibertarians lends itself naturally to this sort of transition. Several prominent economists had encouraged Yeltsin to implement some sort of land-tax with basic income, IIRC.

I don’t think that Russia’s problems were with libertarian economics (they weren’t aiming for anything we’d call “libertarian”), but with poor government accountability.

Changing society is hard, however, libertarians are no worse than anyone else in showing how improvements actually get made. The only reason that mainstream Dems and Reps seem to have reasonable strategies is that they have built the illusion that regular people can achieve their goals by contributing to electoral campaigns.

I think libertarianism is weak on how improvements actually get made–or not.

Weird coincidence that l read both your post and the Larson yesterday!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN3z3eSVG7A&feature=player_embedded

A russian told me that when he was in the army stationed in Siberia that they would be brought into the local factory to work for about three days after every pay day because the regular workers would stay drunk until they ran out of money.

I remember this one from the Yeltsin kleptocracy years, before things settled into today’s oligarchy.

Ivan is sitting at his Moscow apartment window. All of a sudden, he looks at the scene below him and yells out to his wife, “Masha, Masha, bring me my rifle and come here!” Masha comes running to the window and, handing the rifle to Ivan, says, “What? What is there to see here? It’s just another store line.” Ivan says, “No, Masha, look, the line is exiting the store, with meat, with cabbage, goodness, even with tvs! Don’t you see, the Communists are back in power!”

Needless to say, the joke was not (necessarily) about wanting to see the Communists actually back in power, but was a pretty bitter commentary about the massive impoverishment that resulted from the Yeltsin kleptocracy when Russian life-expectancy and almost every other indicator of societal economic health took a steep nose-dive.

Also, and this too should be needless to say, but the fact that I’m pointing out that the Yeltsin years were a complete economic disaster for the bulk of the Russian people does not mean I’m endorsing the old Soviet system, so the usual suspects can keep their “Black Book of Communism” excerpts to themselves.

Amazing how far the RICO law has taken us. You can’t even pay bond using money from an ATM.