When I got to the University of Virginia grad school of economics, everybody agreed that the Soviet Union was making huge strides toward overtaking the United States in production. I took the course in Soviet Economis taught by the one heretic on this subject, Warren Nutter. He became one of Barry Goldwater’s two economic advisors for the 1964 campaign, along with Milton Friedman. He was not one of the two Nobel Laureates who were in my faculty.
I say all this, once again, to point out why the man in line to become dean repeated publically that he planned “to clean out that nest of right-wingers in the Economics Department.” He was typical of the Free Speech Left in the 1960s. When he took over three years later and fired the faculty for its views not one liberal offered a breath of objection anywhere.
I point out the level of Nutter and others because there was no question of competence here. It was completely a matter of politics and nobody doubted it. In fact, when I went out into the job market, everybody knew that the University was one of the top economics departments in the world. If this had happened to a leftist, we would still be hearing about it. But it NEVER happened to a leftist.
Nutter went to the Soviet Union a lot. He saw the poverty there. He saw what Solzheitsyn saw, that the standard of living kept going DOWN, not UP. On the other side, tanged against him, was the entire profession of economics. Not only that, alined with the entire economics community was the Central Intellligence Agency. Like everybody else, the CIA insisted that the Soviet Union was hard on its people and crushed freedom, but it was making huge gains.
Nutter kept making hte argument they were being silly. But Nutter’s problem, like mine, was that the explanation for the mistake was so obvious a child could see it, but a bureaucracy couldn’t. Here it is:
If you and dozen other people set to build an automobile from the iron ore up, it will take you maybe a million hours of labor time. You have to learn everything. You have to learn every field of knowledge. You have to build every piece of equipment for transforming the metal, rubber, glass and everything else into forms usable in a car.
The Soviet Union had no price system. They measured everything in terms of Marxist economics. Marxist economics says that the value of every good is the “objective labor time” invested in it. Nutter used to explain to us how the Soviet Union tried to produce glass. The planners would order a factory to produce so many square inches. The result was glass that was so thin it literally felt apart when it was lifted. When they tried tonnage, it was too thick. Then they tried more and more specifications.
It is simple fact of life that the price system does all that. You know what glass is because if you produce glass people can’t use you can’t sell it. Doing without a price system is like doing without eyesight. You suddenly realize that trying to use hearing and touch have limitations you never considered before.
So for Communists, making glass is a problem but making a CAR is a nightmare. That’s what happened to the Yugo. They still were not used to the market. What one could get away with under Communism was dead on arrival in the free market.
So the first attempts at making automobiles were hilarious to Nutter, but not to the guys responsible. Stalin lacked a sense of humor about it. They got parts that woldn’t fit together when they tried to ASSEMBLE the car.
OK, they finally got a few cars. But the amount of labor time expended on each car, even ignoring the false starts, was astronomical. So how did they measure their car output? In terms of money paid for them?
Not bloody likely. The only market for Soviet cars was literally the captive market. NOBODY outside the USSR, Communists included, wanted a Soviet car. So, to repeat, how do you measure the car output?
In objective labor time. So a “car,” in Soviet terms, cost ten thousand hours or more in objective labor time. A car in the United States cost a member of the United Auto Workers maybe two hundred hours of his labor time, and most of hte money didn’t go to him. So as the Soviets, by copying American cars as best they could by translating them into quotas, made models that could not be sold outside the USSR in increasing numbers, each car went onthe Soviet production index as another ten thousand hours of objective labor time.
The Soviet Union has seventy seasons of bad weather throughout the Soviet period. A leftist or a CIA economist would look you straight inthe eye and tell you that. So a bushel of wheat took a hell of a lot more Objective Labor Time to produce on a Soviet Coolective or a State Farm than it had even with serfdom. This fact alone doubled the value of wheat produced inthe Soviet Union in terms of Soviet economics.
No one has EVER noticed this, but Soviet Russia was the ONLY white country in all of history that went through seventy yeras without producing one single new good that anybody outside the USSR was willing to buy. The biggest white NATION on earth! That is a feat only a bucnh of “intellectuals” could accomplish.
But in the 1960s, when the CIA was desperate to prove the Soviet threat and was full of pro-Soviets, when a professor not only could, but DID get fired for challenging this CIA-Soviet line, all this obvious stuff was heresy.
In those days, I would have sworn that exposure ofhte myth of Communist efficiency simply could never be overcome, b ut I stood solidly with the truth even when I was in intelligence.
At the same time, I would have sworn that the myth that was in absolute control, “Modern anthropology has proven that all races are equal in inhertied abilities” would NEVER be unseated. But I have seen it totally destroyed.
The statement now is that race doesn’t exist. But they use that as a cover for admitting that “groups” have huge heritable differences. They just aren’t races. They are east and went Africans and so forth. But Jensen and Rushton publish major articles now, and nobody even tries to shout them down inside academia.
By the time the USSR collapsed, it was generally admitted that the whole system was silly. Not incorrect, silly.
Inside the USSR, when Reagan called the Soviet Union an the Evil Empire, it made a huge difference. People living under it only kept a shred of respect for it because broadcasts from the West said it made some kind of sense. Harvard was a major factor in keeping hte Communist system alive. To CALL it evil, to CALL it silly, was destructive. The liberal howls at those adjectives should give you some idea that they were hitting home.
Nobody ever heard of our constant fight to break the “modern anthropologists have proven that all races are equal in inhertied characteristics” line. Liberals and liberatrians are still trying to prove that the Soviet Union broke during Reagan’s term in office because of sunspot activity or Yeltsin’s treason to the Communist cause. When the Communist kidnapping of Gorbeczev was under way, every libral I heard talking about it blamed the crackdown on Yeltsin.
That was all tossed into the Memory Hole three days later.
People need to hear that what is going on is as evil and as sillly as they think it is. That brings systems down.
An opposition that respects silliness and evil is the best friend that silliness and evil can ever have.
When you, alone, ask somebody “Why?” about the Big Lie of today, you, alone, are striking a blow that person will never forget. I have thought it was hopeless many, many times. But today no one can even understand WHY I thought it was hopeless. It’s so obvious now, you see. And when we had won the battle, some Ann Coulter or Bill Rusher or some neo repeated it and the revolution started there, you see.
There is no problem if you join the mob and give the wrong people CREDIT. I don’t mind that. But if you do that, you also have totally warped idea of HISTORY. You think you have a right to whine abouthow hopeless everything is, the way I did. I didn’t know I was MAKING history. But I didn’t discrouage my comrades by whining about how hopeless the whole thing was. What I truly did not realize was the power of subversion when something is silly and evil and no one says so.
You can make history. But you must ignore all the history books and all the official commentary. If you hammer away it spreads. The offical commentators are the LAST to use what you say. Almost every person you talk to, if you hit what we all know is true, will remember it. It gets around.
“If I had a hammer…”
I have a hammer. The Soviet Union did not survive the fax and the Internet. Academia today is on its way to being a laughingstock no one could have imagined a generation ago.
Suck your thumb or be in on the kill.
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