As someone who grew up at the end of Soviet era and studied it in college, reading Jesse Myerson’s Rolling Stone piece about the “five economic reforms Millennials should be fighting for” set off an alarm.
His words showed me just how much has been forgotten since the Soviet Union ceased to exist on Dec. 26, 1991, and how little Millennials have been taught about the real reasons for its economic collapse.
All of Myerson’s proposals have been tried before on a macro level and were met with disastrous results. They worked so ‘well’ that the only thing Millennials know about the Soviet Union, if anything, likely comes from a history textbook.
Myerson’s piece sounded an awful lot like a scene from the 1987 miniseries “Amerika” about a Soviet takeover of America.
“We are the voice of the new generation,” a young boy says in the scene. “We are the voice of the new people. The destructive ways of the past are gone. We will replace them with our vision of the future … Everyone will go to school, everyone will have a job, everyone will be equal. No one will exploit or be exploited, and all those who oppose this wonderful vision will be crushed.”
The similarities of Myerson’s proposals with those from “Amerika” should not surprising considering his invective against capitalism and his self-identification as a communist. His suggestions are similar to those advocated by the Communist Party USA on its website.
Myerson’s neo-Soviet proposals show a fundamental misunderstanding of macroeconomics and the laws of supply and demand.
Soviet citizens were guaranteed a job and social security, and everything was collectively owned — at least theoretically. Private banking didn’t exist either in the Soviet Union.
Everything in the Soviet economy was allocated by government bureaucrats who worked for an agency known as GOSPLAN, rather than market forces. The GOSPLAN bureaucrats, like Myerson, pretended as though the laws of supply and demand could be arbitrarily abolished. This was vividly seen in the fields where whole crops were left to rot because of poorly distributed resources.
GOSPLAN’s inability to manage the Soviet economy independent of market forces destabilized it and led to its collapse. Similar situations developed in other socialist countries.
Central planning turned life for the average Soviet citizen became a living hell because of constant shortages of everything. Ordinary Soviets were equal alright — equally poor and miserable. Most were forced to live in communal apartments with two or three other families with little or no privacy. Everything was rationed. If you wanted a car, you would be put on a waiting list sometimes for 10 to 15 years. If you wanted groceries, good luck. You would have had to stand in long lines at shops that offered few selections.
If you wanted luxury goods such as designer jeans or something as mundane as a toilet that worked, you would have to go on the black market.
Worker productivity consistently fell well below Western standards in the Soviet Union and its satellite states because workers had guaranteed job security regardless of job performance.
But the dirty little secret that utopians like Myerson do not want to face is that collective ownership does not abolish the hated 1 percent. It just creates a new one. Corrupt Wall Street tycoons simply get replaced with corrupt government bureaucrats and party officials under socialism.
The clever and the crafty always find ways to game the system to their advantage. In the Soviet system, Communist Party members and top bureaucrats lived like kings compared with the average Soviet citizen. Consequently socialist altruism gave way to corruption, which paved the way for the system’s collapse.
Leftist utopianism tragically misunderstands human nature. History has consistently shown that socialist schemes inevitably become rife with elitism and corruption.
As George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
