One writer in my New Right Papers anthology talked about an experience he had in the USSR when it was still ruled by Social Progress. Apparently to show the flaws in capitalist production, he was shown the hula hoops. There was a giant warehouse containing millions of hula hoops the USSR had produced at the time of that craze in the 50s.

They still had them. It is an example of what I said before, that Communists have no way to figure out what consumer goods to produce, so they produce whatever the market economy produces. But to them, what they were showing him was how his wonderful market economy produced things nobody wanted.

But the hula hoop was not a planned event. They just grew and manufacturers produced them. Then the craze died and they stopped producing them. That’s what you get when Mommy Professor doesn’t do your planning for you.

To my writer, that was an example of how stupid the planned economy was. But to them, the fact that they couldn’t give the damned things away to their citizens demonstrated how ridiculous this capitalist product was.

My point is that the Soviets had no more idea what was going on than the CIA did. They had more agents there than we did by a LONG shot, “the KGB is everywhere.” The CIA budget is a secret, and I can tell you as a staffer for the ranking member of the Internal Security Committee, formerly House Un-American Activities Committee, that if you saw their expenditures you would be as lost as you are now.

But between the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA and the others, we spent billions on knowing what went on inside the USSR, from qualified experts.

Lots of information was produced, tens of millions of words poured out, but nobody saw the USSR coming down, here or there. This never seemed to bother anybody, and certainly nobody in the Intelligence Community was ever criticized for it or lost a night’s sleep over it.

So back to one of our basic questions: Why was this information PRODUCED? Why were all those people paid so much and no one ever asked why they didn’t see the whole thing coming down? If Pepsi-Cola went out of business, went out of business next week, and no one in the Coca-Cola Company had any idea it was happening or why it happened, I guarantee you there would be a LOT of empty seats to be filled in the Executive Suites in Atlanta.

We know all those executives and experts WERE hired, and we know they had not the slightest hint the USSR was going to disappear overnight. We also know that those who haven’t retired are now promoted and well-paid in the Department of Homeland Security.

In fact it was exactly those same executives and experts and the people they hired and trained who were in charge on September 11, 2001. By now almost all of those who missed on the Soviet Incident AND on 9/11 have gotten fat pensions and/or big-pay jobs as Advisors in the private sector. But their spirit, and their level of competence, lives on in those they made experts to succeed them.

And no one notices.