It is now recognized that one of the biggest blunders committed by the Western intelligence agencies was the fact that they continually misread the Soviet Economy through most of the Twentieth Century. They never realized that the Soviet Union was failing economically and they missed the opportunity to learn the valuable lessons that were begging to be learned.
Those lessons could have come handy at this time and they could have been of use to the ill-advised Americans who mindlessly follow the steps of the old Soviet Union not realizing what they are doing to their economy or where they are taking their country.
The most damaging aspect of Soviet economics was not that it was centrally planned, though this was a factor, but that the Soviets planned the wrong things. To give credit where credit is due, they did well building and erecting big projects such as the power plants, railroads, steel mills, tanks, missiles and ships but they proved to be myopic when it came to the consumer side of the equation which they neglected woefully.
What is wrong with this approach to economics is that without an industry to produce the goods and services that the ordinary people are eager to buy, there is little to sponge the money paid to the workers. In fact, the Soviet workers could not buy or own the projects they were building and so they spent the money on the few items they found in the stores such as the food, the clothing and the everyday necessities of life.
But then nothing remained on the shelves to motivate the people to want more or want better things. Indeed, nothing was left to the imagination to inspire them to work hard in order to get.
And numerous stories surfaced about life in the communist countries, stories that illustrate the lack of ambition the system induced in the population. They were dispirited people who went home at the end of the day, slumped in their seats to review what had gone on throughout the day and if nothing terrible was pointed out, considered themselves lucky and prayed that tomorrow will be as uneventful as today.
All the while, the Soviet government was forced to control all aspects of the economic life including the wages and the prices. And despite the fact that the people had little money to spend on anything, the inflationary pressures were always present because the people had even less goods and services on which to spend the money. Still, the people found a number of items on which to throw some money, items such as the contraband goods that sold at inflated prices.
These items were found on the black market of what was considered luxury goods smuggled into the communist countries from the outside. Sold at exorbitant prices, the goods caused the emergence of a myriad of unsavory practices adopted by the smugglers. In turn, the practices prompted the authorities to take measures that were no more elegant than those of the smugglers.
The spectacle made the system look like a failure in the eyes of its own citizens and the impact was best expressed by the joke that the communists circulated about themselves. It went something like this: "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." In other words the system had fallen into a sea of lethargy and because they were powerless to do anything about it, the people willingly rode the wave of apathy.
After decades of this sort of experiment, the Eastern Europeans who lived nearest to the borders of the Western countries realized that the West had more to offer to its citizens than their regime could ever provide for them, and they began to grumble. The contagion spread to Russia itself and before long the communist empire was beginning to crumble.
Yet, had the Soviets employed a fraction of their workforce to produce enough consumer goods to satisfy the population, the regime would still be alive today and the communist economies would be looking like that of China. But none of this happened and the result was that the Soviet empire was overturned and Russia, together with her satellites, was forced to change for ever.
And here we are today faced with an America where some people are dismantling the once vibrant system of the country in an apparent effort to make it operate like the Soviet system of old. The way these people implement their plan is to create a climate of paranoia which they inject into the country’s politico-cultural body. This mobilizes the country’s resources, the control of which they grab and put in the service of their hidden agenda.
The result is that in the same way the communists feared the outside world, the Americans are being scared by the repeated assertions that the world is hostile to their values and is out to destroy their country. This creates a culture where the mega projects are encouraged at the expense of the smaller ones in the mistaken belief that America’s security will be better served when the low tech consumer products are made by the emerging nations while America frees herself to build a high tech military industrial complex.
What is wrong with this idea is that while money is being pumped into beefing up a high tech industry, the country is gradually producing less of the low tech parts and components that feed into the weapon systems. Such parts and components are now imported from outside the country, placing America in a situation where she can be cut off at the whim of the foreign suppliers. For this reason, the calls went out to start manufacturing those parts and components locally.
And there are two ways to do this. Either you produce just enough parts to satisfy your needs or you mass produce them and have more than you need. In the first instance the cost per part will be prohibitive; in the second you will look for customers who would buy the extra parts. But since the country does not have the low tech civilian industries that can absorb such parts, you go with the first option which is the recipe for ruining the economy.
This was the choice that the Soviets made when they traded a functioning economy for an impressive military, and this is where America is being dragged today. Choosing guns over butter did not work for the Soviets and will not work for the Americans. It is now obvious that when you are defeated economically it does not matter how impressive your military is because nobody will take you seriously.
Moreover, the reason why the Soviets were able to become a military superpower in the first place was that they lived off the inheritance left to them by previous regimes. But after 70 years of surviving on past achievements, the Soviets had depleted their inheritance and were forced to expose the bankruptcy of their system.
Likewise, the Americans are now living on the inheritance left to them by their forefathers which will soon be depleted. And this inheritance is nothing more than the country’s good name against which America is borrowing trillions of dollars to buy the products that are no longer made locally. And however powerful America’s military may look today, it will become as useless as the Soviet military when the rest of the economy will cease to function.
And you will know the economy has ceased to function when the country will find it difficult to borrow money on the international markets. Unable to buy from abroad the goods and services that are not made locally, a contraband industry will flourish where the smuggled goods will trade at exorbitant prices. And America will come to look like a Third World country.
What get you into a situation like this are the subtle attacks by people who pretend to be your friends and the protectors of your values. But in fact these people have a hidden agenda, and they can only stand on the ashes of your values. To succeed in implementing their agenda they reverse the reality as to who is your friend and who is your enemy. This done, they get you to reverse the policies that brought glory to your country under the tutelage of your forefathers.
It is now evident that the Marxists who destroyed the Russian empire from within have imported the same wrongheaded policies into America perhaps to get their sweet revenge for the real and imagined injuries caused by the events of the McCarthy era. And they are mobilizing the gullible and the naïve among the locals to support them into recreating the conditions which caused the demise of the Soviet Empire.
The way out of this muddle is to know who your real enemies are and who your friends are, a job that the Western intelligence agencies must now undertake to redeem themselves. What is clear is that Karl Marx was never an Arab and if he were alive today he would be a rabid anti-Arab. Consequently, America must not be afraid of the World and must rebuild her industrial base to become a diversified economy again.
The supposedly new conservatives who call themselves neocons have turned coat not because they believed in the conservative values of the Liberal Democracies but because they retain the values of the Bolshevik Social Democracies that failed so miserably in Russia and in Eastern Europe. In plain English these people still cherish the old communist movement and they remain as deadly as ever except that now they have their claws stuck well into the politico-cultural body of America.
It would be more appropriate to refer to these characters as the neo-coms rather than neo-cons.