I think that I have just read a post of Eva's that I can say that it is 100% my
experience as well. The pendulum will swing as more people come here and see that
the streets are a fraud and that many educational, cultural and health programs
they enjoyed there are not generally available here except to the upper classes.
I usually agree with Brad but in this case I think it had more to do with a general
dissatisfaction on the part of the public based upon the information revolution
piercing the Iron Curtain. Such raised expectations put strains on the society in
ways that it could not fulfill. If I understand Jay correctly, we could be in for
a similar situation here but for different reasons. I'm sure that I will
disagree with Eva again, since many of my best teachers were Hungarian, but there
is no disagreement here.
I've been reading some new literature on the way that Thomas Jefferson put out a
program of forcing the indigenous peoples into debt by limiting their food and
forcing them to buy from the government monopoly. He then traded the debt for huge
tracts of land. It was amazing to me how old the current economic shill game is
and this from the framer of the "Declaration of Independence" from English
tyranny. Tsk. Tsk......REH
Durant wrote:
> > I don't think this is right. The Soviet economy was quite able to suffocate
> > on its own without anyone holding its head in the toilet. There were many
> > problems, but among the most important were a concentration on investment in
> > heavy industry without making that industry more efficient and productive,
> > and an impossible bureaucratic central planning apparatus (*) which took the
> > place of market mechanisms in the allocation of resources.
>
> (*) which took the place of democracy: the free flow of information
> on which decisionmaking should be made in a planned economy.
> The freeest possible market mechanism of victorian Brittain
> allowed child labour and unimaginable poverty in the richest
> empire of the globe.
>
> ...
> > Because of the concentration on heavy industry during the Soviet era, no
> > tradition of mass producing consumers goods developed.
>
> So how was the millions of domestic appliances produced
> for the Eastern block? My mum has a russian fridge aged 20+ years,
> my best lightest vac was russian, and the small colour tv wasn't
> bad. Most people had these things by the eighties, even in the
> small hungarian village where we lived 1983-87. Most of these stuff
> was probably not as flash as the western equivalent and there was not
> a lot of choice, but they were functional and cheap enough and
> available eventually. This is not a defence of the system, just
> a correction about a fact I happen to know...
>
> > As a consequence,
> > Russia imports a very large proportion of its consumer goods.
>
> Because loans are linked with semi-compulsary imports;
> because people are brainwashed that that the good things
> are western produced. Because production is grounding to a halt.
> In Hungary some industries are bought up by western competitors for
> peanuts and than closed down (e.g. paper factories bought up by
> austrian companies)
>
> > As well, the fact that a considerable proportion of GNP was devoted to the
> > military, that a prolonged war was fought in Afghanistan, and that the
> > government had to deal with rebellion in places like Chechnya, did not help.
> > Nor do low oil prices, a major source of government revenue.
> >
>
> Just to add: guess who will make money from Hungary (and others)
> joining Nato. Clue: not the hungarian citizens.
>
> > Ed Weick
> >
> >
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
