Calling a political opponent a communist is silly. Not even the Soviet Union or China called themselves communist. They called themselves socialist. Communism is when the productive surplus is controlled by the workers themselves. The government owning a business and deciding what to do with a surplus is just a government elite controlling the surplus instead of an owner or manager elite. Communism would be not a government elite or capitalist elite controlling the surplus, but the workers controlling the surplus. The socialist governments were supposed to be a transition phase to true communism. The closest things to this might be cooperatives where the workers also own the business, although those are done within a larger capitalist system.
Russia’s privatization after the Cold War, failed partially because the Russian government was too weak. It could not enforce property rights and the rule of law. Instead, the government was corrupted by the oligarchs. When Putin took over, he exchanged many oligarchs for one–himself.
When the U.S. tries to deregulate for potentially good reasons, and avoids taxes, we need to be careful that we are not setting up our own oligarchs who avoid helpful taxes and regulations at the expense of the people.
Putin doesn’t want to use nuclear weapons. If he did, he risks the destruction of his country. Putin, like the Soviet Union in history, uses nuclear weapons as bluster to threaten countries whose leaders and people believe the likelihood of Russia using nukes is higher than it is. Trump is scared. He’s happy to use or threaten military force against countries without nukes, but Russia invades its neighbor in a war of conquest while committing many atrocities, and Trump is obsessed with peace, even, at times, weakening support to Ukraine to appease Putin. Letting Russia gain things with nuclear threats increases the incentive for other countries to get nukes, and one of those countries may be more willing to actually use them.
Chinese economic growth has slowed despite not yet being a rich country.
Instead of allowing free market actors to flourish, the Communist Party is clamping down so that private actors won’t be a threat to their control. This will damage their attempt to return to high economic growth.
“we should not judge the eighth and final Soviet leader, who died..at the age of 91, by his base geopolitical desires but rather by the glorious human flourishing that his actions—and especially his inactions—allowed to take place. Gorbachev’s economically desperate late-1980s policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reform) unleashed a whirlwind of freedom-seeking among hundreds of millions of captive peoples, quickly overwhelming any one man’s (or regime’s) ability to control it.
And during most—though definitely not all—key moments of potential armed conflict between dictatorial hardliners and outgunned revolutionaries, Gorby told the generals to stand down. This is an achievement worth lingering on and learning from.”
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“The result was that, under the watches of both Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush, November 9, 1989 became the most liberating day of the most liberating month of the most liberating year in human history. Hardly limited to the long-suffering nations of Central Europe, the imperial drawdowns from both sides of the Cold War brought crucial and long-awaited relief to the proxy-war-scarred post-colonialist countries of Africa and South America. The fact that Gorbachev planned for almost none of this should not dull our appreciation for him not getting in the way.”