Posted on 10/14/2010 8:59:16 PM PDT by tired1
Aside from the obviuous shortcommings of central planning, I'm interested in the circumdtances which caused the USSR to implode. Was it inability to meet foreign obligations?
Would appreciate opioions and any sources.
They had rulers who hated the free enterprise system, nationalized their industries, and punished anyone who tried to make an honest living.
Oh, wait ... I’m confusing it with the United States of America under Barack Hussein Obama.
Letting them steam toxic software to control the pipelines was pretty slick!
Yuri Bezmenov (youtube) provides some insight to this as well. The subversive methods of the KGB eventually came back to bite them in the ass.
Your’re not at all confused.
Don’t have any sources anymore but I do remember an analysis of their central planning problems. It seems as though they couln’t figure out how much anything cost. They set prices by extrapolating from prices they paid for Western goods. The price of electricity was always a mystery.
Sorry I can’t remember where I would have read it but stuck in my mind because I was just discovering the Austrians & was very excited about this insight. Sometime in the early 80’s.
It was one of many issues. Not much the Soviets could export for hard cash except for its resources and weapons.
Wanna $10 AK47? Com on down to crazy Ivan’s house of guns!!!!
Corruption in commie govt.and the money they spent in Vietnam.
Yes, a hard currency deficit cuased by collapsing energy prices which was a main source of their income.That is why they never had any goods on the shelves to sell at the end. They never had a dynamic economy and they had all those third world satellite beggar nations who depended on them for support.Reagan once asked rhetorically in a cabinet meeting what do we have more of than the USSR. Many thought he was referring to missiles. He said money.And that was the game plan to outspend them into oblivion.
steam = steal (speel check doesnt work)
In addition to some of the causes already listed there was a vital transmission belt which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The KGB.
The KGB was one of the few institutions to have the real numbers regarding the Soviet decline and inability to compete. Seeing no future with communist policy, they completely abandoned the Politburo and the Party.
With an unpaid army remaining in barracks, and the KGB disloyal, the Soviet government had no teeth. This is why the dissolution of the USSR was -relatively- bloodless.
It will be interesting to see what happens when and if the USA truly does become bankrupt, and even the D.C. IOUs are refused.
Not familiar with that initiative- please expound.
So they ammased a huge pile of debt and called it quits?
Overspending on Defense to keep up with the Joneses, think the Good Ole U.S. of A.
Inability to financially support satellite states, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, etc.
Over reaching on expansion and military ventures, think Crapganistan.
Failure to open new markets for oil, again think Crapganistan.
Marginalized on the world stage, think Reagan, The Pope, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Margaret Thatcher.
The USSR failed for the same reason any planned economy eventually fails: you need robust markets where people can buy and sell freely for price to function as a register of value.
Also, the USSR had no concept of bankruptcy. So non-performing firms could persist forever, destroying value, with no market incentives to innovate their operations.
The Reader’s Digest Version: “In fact, the amount of Moscow’s annual borrowings in the West was roughly equivalent to the total cost of all of the Soviet Union’s foreign commitments. In other words, the West in the 1980’s was unwittingly providing crucial financial life support to the Soviet regime on the order of 100% of the cost of its external empire. President Reagan believed that this remarkable set of facts offered the U.S. a non-military means of rolling back Soviet global power and repression while creating a financial train wreck within the country from which Moscow would probably not recover. As history has shown, it didn’t.
When Soviet forces began to mass on the Polish border in 1981 and later forced the imposition of martial law in that country, President Reagan responded with a number of policy measures, including implementation of what we called the “strategic trade triad.” Specifically, this meant sharply limiting Moscow’s access to:
1) Western Europe’s natural gas markets; 2)officially subsidized lending arrangements; and 3)sophisticated, militarily-relevant U.S. and Western technologies.
The so-called Siberian gas pipeline dispute within the Atlantic alliance in 1982 occurred in this context and tested America’s resolve that the second 3,600-mile strand of this huge two-strand pipeline project not be built. The already-committed first strand would also be delayed by embargoing key U.S. oil and gas equipment and technology which was unavailable elsewhere. The cost to Moscow of losing the second strand of the Siberian gas pipeline was to be roughly $10-15 billion annually — a debilitating sum — not to mention the costs of a two year delay in bringing the first strand on-line. (This effort was complimented by the Reagan Administration’s intervention with the Saudi’s urging them to increase oil production and thus lower prices – representing another blow to Soviet hard currency earnings.) These three major economic initiatives to curtail Western life-support to the USSR were combined with a massive U.S. military build-up, the launch of the Strategic Defense Initiative and head-on U.S. engagement against Soviet aggression in the Third World to accelerate, if not cause, the end of the so-called “Evil Empire.” It is no coincidence that the Kremlin defaulted on some $90 billion in Western debt a mere two days before the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991.” - Remarks of Honorable Roger W. Robinson, Jr.
President and CEO of RWR Inc. and former Senior Director of International Economic Affairs at the National Security Council
Alaskan World Affairs Council May 7, 1999
Wasn’t Maggie supposed to meet with Sarah P this fall?
Could be a passing of the torch.
“We pretend to work; they pretend to pay us”
Rent and watch “Lives of Others.” You’ll see.
They did meet.
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