We all realize that the primary campaign for the nomination is very different from the electoral campaign. That is one of the first rules one learns in politics.

But the big lesson is, with most people the lesson stops right there.

A Mantra Thinker will START with a rule in one area, and test it out in other areas.

As soon as you start doing this you realize that a rule set is critical in others. One of the major reasons potentially successful movements fail is because the way its adherents choose the people they will pay attention to is totally different from the process by which they would choose leaders and speakers who would be successful in making the movement public.

Communism is sort of a total inversion of this rule. From the first Lenin had his eye on complete power.

The whole history of Communism is that it has been brilliantly, expertly SOLD but, once in power, it is a disaster which, if it were not so horrible, would be funny.

The actual Soviet economy was a horrible joke, planting summer wheat in winter, setting glass quotes by the pound so that it came out in useless thick slabs, then by the square meter so thin that it shattered as soon as they picked it up. Because America had a hula hoop craze, the Soviet Union produced millions of hula hoops, all if which ended up in warehouses.

But at that time EVERY SINGLE PAID SOVIET EXPERT was declaring that the USSR was rapidly gaining on the United States in per capita income, just as NOT ONE SINGLE SOVIET EXPERT predicted the fall (No, the one you heard about didn’t, either) of the USSR.

Which means that the left was very good at weeding out those who got paid as “Soviet experts.”

Outside of the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia, the latter of which was “cleaned out” by a new liberal dean, every economics department in America and especially in Europe declared that the Soviet Empire and the Chinese economies were advancing by leaps and bounds.

I saw those figures in the official UN statistics under “Centrally Planned Economies.”

After it fell, all economists admitted that the maximum size of the Soviet economy was about half that of the Netherlands.

Suddenly everybody forgot there ever was a debate on this subject between the whole economics profession and those of us at UVA.

If the left were a hundredth, a HUNDREDTH, as good at RUNNING countries as they are at selling their stupid programs, they would have been running the world for a century already.