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Then he bought two old Soviet dairy farms. This sentence is the key to understanding why many Russians feel little or no sympathy for "victims" like him. Sovi

Then he bought two old Soviet dairy farms. This sentence is the key to understanding why many Russians feel little or no sympathy for "victims" like him. Soviet dairy farms once belonged to the Soviet people - in much the same way that, say, the Washington Monument, the US National Parks, or the US Army belong to the people of the United States. How would you feel if the most hardened violent criminals came to power in the US, and arranged to have these properties turned over to private owners, to run for their benefit (or to pillage and destroy, as was the fate of most Soviet industry) ? One can debate the practical merits of planned economies all day long but this does not change the fact that privatization is theft. The former owners of Soviet facilities - the Soviet people - were not adequately compensated for their loss. It is highly doubtful that fair compensation for the privatization of public property is possible even in principle. Do you dole out homeopathic-sized shares of stock? (Criminals buy them back for pennies-on-the-dollar from the masses in lean times - or at gunpoint...) What do you issue to the not-yet-born citizens who will no longer be heir to the means of production? (Answer in practice: zilch.) Privatization is "what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine" writ large, plain and simple. Russians who are not in some way aligned with the thieves' guild which has been running that country since the Soviet collapse by and large quietly recognize this fact. This is why sympathy and political support for the so-called "entrepreneurs" is and will continue to be thin.

sili 15y ago
On the other side of the coin, there was little guaranty that most state run businesses would survive any way. Yes, some were bought up by by shady characters, dismantled and sold of by parts for profit. However, others were bought by the likes of the protagonist of the story who invested in them and made them profitable businesses. The alternative would have been for those companies to become abandoned, which means they would have been picked apart by the locals anyway.
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  there was little guaranty that most state run businesses would survive any way. Why? Oh, because their immune system, that keeps parasites down (the State in question) was murdered. That's right, murdered. The alternative would have been for those companies to become abandoned Why? As long as the natural resources to run the farms continue to be available (and why should they not?) and Russians still want to drink milk and eat cheese (they do), the farms would keep going happily ever after. made them profitable businesses It is possible to get high-quality milk and cheese into peoples' stomachs without American notions of "profit" being in the mix at all. Is the sewer system in the town where you live profitable?
  - SwellJoe 15y ago
    It is possible to get high-quality milk and cheese into peoples' stomachs without American notions of "profit" being in the mix at all. The evidence of this assertion is significantly lacking. I know several Russian immigrants; who came to the US during the Soviet era. The difference in quality and quantity of food available in US supermarkets was a point of amazement for them. Honestly, I feel like you're trying really hard to play devil's advocate rather than actually believe any of this stuff. It's just too outlandish to believe someone would try to present the USSR as a successful, functioning, state. History has already given its verdict on the USSR. It was an abysmal failure. In fact, now that the walls preventing communication have come down, and people are able to speak freely about how things really were, we know things were worse in the USSR than we in the US ever realized at the time. People were poorer, corruption was worse, shortages of necessary goods were more widespread, the state itself was in a much more chaotic state most of the time than we ever imagined (the US feared the USSR, because of its perceived strength and unity of focus; but most of those fears turned out to be based on myth). Is the sewer system in the town where you live profitable? In some cities in the US (and probably Canada, as well), water/sewer is provided by a private, presumably profitable, company; private co-ops are also common. They operate under strict guidelines and regulations at both the local and federal level (for safety and to insure low-income families have access to clean water and sewer service), but it's not all that uncommon, and I'm unaware of anyone raising a fuss about privately owned utilities (power, garbage service, and communications, utilities are all frequently privately owned in the US and Canada). What's your point?
    - xxpor 15y ago
      > I'm unaware of anyone raising a fuss about privately owned utilities (power, garbage service, and communications, utilities are all frequently privately owned in the US and Canada) That's not true at all. Net neutrality? Muni broadband plans being blocked by the likes of comcast? Infrastructure should be state owned, because duplication is a huge waste, and there can't be a normal level of competition because the start up costs.
      - SwellJoe 15y ago
zeteo 15y ago
You seem to be issuing a wholesale approval of the Soviet economic system as just and moral. Are you actually serious? There's a very big difference between the Washington Monument and a dairy farm. A dairy farm is supposed to be an economic, well-administered business. You may wax poetic with Marx all you want, but history has shown conclusively that state ownership is terribly wasteful and inefficient. Yes, there were lots of difficulties implementing privatization in Eastern Europe, and it's hard to find a perfectly fair system for it. That doesn't make it a theft. If you want an analogy think of a bankruptcy - except the whole economic system was bankrupt in those cases. Without a switch to private property all those economies would be much, much further down the economic drain right now; when instead, some of them have recovered quite nicely.
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  history has shown conclusively that state ownership is terribly wasteful and inefficient. If history is teaching us anything here, it is that ownership by an absentee-lord (whether elected by Communist bureaucrats or stockholders, it matters little) is wasteful and inefficient. And let's not forget that efficiency is a false god. An economy that leaves the masses starving or mired in lawlessness might still be "efficient" from some theoretical standpoint (efficient in feeding those who are fed, in protecting the lives of those who are in the designated protected class, etc.) The USA is dying the death of the USSR: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dtxqwqr_20dc52sm http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dtxqwqr_20dc52sm And it will be remembered in the same way, as a brutal dinosaur of an empire, run by sociopaths, riddled by economic delusions worthy of the wackiest religious cult. Without a switch to private property all those economies would be much, much further down the economic drain On what evidence, on whose word, should we believe this? some of them have recovered quite nicely Financiers, mafiosi, and their lackeys riding yachts is not a "recovery."
  - Duff 15y ago
    The US isn't a paradise, but we do have a system of law that is reasonably just and at least makes an effort to respect the rights of its citizens. As the US has transitioned to an imperial power, some rather obvious warts have developed, but the democratic republican (lowercase is intentional) tradition persists. Human society has shifted dramatically since industrialization, and we haven't perfected the system since then. The US and other Western nations aren't the ideal, but I think we're closer to it than the Soviets were or would have been.
mbateman 15y ago
> It is highly doubtful that fair compensation for the privatization of public property is possible even in principle. What? The state-owned dairy farms had a cost, covered by the citizens, presumably in the form of taxation. And they had a product: dairy. After privatization, tax revenue ceases to be collected for the dairy farm. People instead pay for the same products directly. Of course the criminal and the corrupt can interfere with this, and continue to impose the tax burden or some such, but exactly what compensation is incalculable here? The farm had a value to the citizens in proportion to how much value it generated for how much cost. And it still does.
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  Taxation in the Western sense was not key to the Soviet economy. You are thinking using the concepts of a world where money is the main unit of exchange. The USSR was not such a world. That country was run quite a bit like a non-profit version of a giant American corporation. Does upper management at IBM levy taxes on the Shipping Department or Human Resources?
  - mbateman 15y ago
    Okay but you can at least go some way in translating my point in terms of valuations more generally. Different divisions within large corporations do have a specific amount of value, and are sometimes thought of as assets and even split off and sold. If you don't like currency you can use whatever metric of value you'd like. I realize there are a lot of assumptions about valuation, property, and/or currency built into my criticism that you or anyone sympathetic to Soviet-style public ownership would probably reject. But that's part of the reason why I pointed it out. You have to accept a lot of IMO implausible views to claim that a publicly owned dairy farm has incomparably more value to citizens than a privately owned one. You seem to be claiming that many Russians at least implicitly hold these views. I hope that's not true.
    - wnight 15y ago
      A publicly and privately run dairy both produce milk. That is their only similarity. The private dairy enriches only the owner, the public dairy enriches everyone. If your only concern is buying a widget then selling your share in the widget factory doesn't seem like a bad idea - they'll keep making them. But if you're concerned about affording the widget it's a horrible idea. As soon as your cash runs out you're widget-less. As such, and seeing as how this is pretty obvious to most everyone, privatization is theft in most people's eyes. There is no fair price when the government is selling our means of productions/resources for short-term gain. No sane person would do it, and no honest representative would do it for them.
SwellJoe 15y ago
Are you Russian? Still living in Russia? I ask, because I don't know any Russians (or citizens of former Soviet-controlled states) who want Russia to return to the way it was, though I think everyone can agree the current state of things is still frighteningly corrupt. But, my exposure is limited. Perhaps the people I know represent an extremist bent; the kind of people who escaped to the US when doing so was extremely difficult, and sometimes dangerous. Just like not all Cubans hate Castros regime, but nearly all the ones who live in the US do.
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  Still living in Russia? Moved to the USA as a child. I highly recommend exploring outside of one's ideological echo-chamber (all of us sit inside such chambers.) You will learn many interesting things! Many of my own political bits have flipped as a result of such exploration.
  - woobar 15y ago
    >Moved to the USA as a child. Then you have no idea what you are talking about...
    - asciilifeform 15y ago
      So you won't read Gibbon, because he never even set foot in ancient Rome? That impostor. Most of what any thinking person reliably knows about the world comes from the printed word.
      - woobar 15y ago
        I agree. Unfortunately you did not back any of your outrages statements with anything but you being born in USSR. All I wanted to point out is that it is not enough.
        asciilifeform 15y ago
        Out of curiosity, what would be "enough"? Can you even imagine yourself being convinced of the positions I brought up? (Are we dealing with a "religious" difference of opinions here?) And what kind of biography would the person doing the convincing need to have? (I only brought up my birthplace because someone specifically asked. I fully agree that it is irrelevant. However, there is the added caveat that much of the relevant material on the implicit question of "was the USSR irredeemably Satanic, and are its destroyers automatically saints?" - the material which collectively forms Soviet culture - will never be translated into English.)
theoj 15y ago
"this does not change the fact that privatization is theft. The former owners of Soviet facilities - the Soviet people - were not adequately compensated for their loss." There's also the original theft that enabled the existence of the Soviet state -- the theft of land and wealth from the former land holding class starting in 1917. The collectives were created from their lands, and they received no compensation -- in fact in many cases they were persecuted and murdered. Some excuse this breach of property rights by saying that the aristocracy was corrupt, evil, etc., just like today's elites are. It's only the communes and collectives who were "good" and whose property rights should be respected. Should everyone be equal economically regardless of merit? The guy who does nothing all day long, and the guy who works hard to build a successful dairy firm -- they all should receive the same salary? It is this type of economic thinking that ruined the USSR - when there's no reward for doing good work, then there's no reason to do good work. Why should I work hard when I can rest and get my guaranteed salary? EDIT: Please attack the arguments not the messenger. I've edited my comment to do the same.
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  you seem to believe that everyone should be equal economically regardless of merit. Interesting implication. It says a fair bit about you, actually. That, like most people on this site, you place every person whose thoughts you read into one of a small number of mental "boxes." I, for instance, am apparently a "Looter" from Ayn Rand's novels. Not everyone is a character from a morality play. Please try to remember this. Not everyone is an uncritical defender or mindless opponent of this or that fashionable doctrine. the guy who works hard to build a successful dairy firm How about the guy who works others hard to build a successful dairy firm? And his grand-children? What should they receive? This is the real issue regarding the aristocrats of any nation. According to some, the USSR began to perish (through widespread cynicism of its own foundational myths) when it finally built a fresh aristocracy of inherited privilege - the Brezhnevian "nomenclature."
  - theoj 15y ago
    "That, like most people on this site, you place every person whose thoughts you read into one of a small number of mental "boxes." I, for instance, am apparently a "Looter" from Ayn Rand's novels." Notice how you placed all the people on HN in a single mental box. In the interest of fairness, can you tell me more about your outlook and why you believe privatization is theft?
lionhearted 15y ago
> One can debate the practical merits of planned economies all day long but this does not change the fact that privatization is theft. No, it's not. Theft is theft. Privatization is privatization. There's been some pretty poorly implemented privatizations in history, but also some decent ones. I'm in Mongolia now, and they did an okay job of it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Stock_Exchange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Stock_Exchange Still imperfect, but much better than the clusterfuck that was communism. Seriously, everyone remotely educated in an ex-communist country hates communism. I've been to most of them - Cambodians, Chinese, Mongolians, Ukrainians, Czechs... it's only people who live in the outstandingly, legendarily prosperous West that wax poetic about the horrors of that era. Seriously, I've seen a lot of it firsthand. I've also been to still-somewhat-communist places like Vietnam, and they operate a hell of a lot worse than their neighbors. Anyways. Generally speaking, trying to repair a massive, systematically flawed system is hard. It's like how the tax breaks on mortgage interest screw up American housing prices, making it so high earners have more of an incentive to buy housing, thus locking younger people, lower earning people, and senior citizens out of housing, or making them pay inflated prices. It's screwed up. It's a bad system. But unwinding it now would cause a cascading set of problems in the housing market. Thankfully, that poor system of incentives is limited to one sector of the American economy, whereas communism pretty much systematically destroys innovation, free thought, invention, and any semblance of sanity and order. Seriously, go compare equivalent communist and non-communist countries. West Germany and East Germany, Taiwan and PRC, Cambodia/Vietnam and Thailand/Malaysia/Singapore (not perfect comprables, but close-ish). Hong Kong and PRC. Oh yeah, and North Korea and South Korea. Communism sucks. Unwinding a broken system is hard to do, but thank god they're trying to move past communism. Edit: Lots of upvotes and lots of downvotes. To the people downvoting, look - Hacker News is, what, 80%+ Western Europe, USA, and Australia? If you're sitting at your computer in San Francisco, you've never been further out of the States than Cancun, and you've gotten your worldview from some professor of Postcolonial Studies that also has never gotten outside of San Francisco, then I don't know what to tell you. Seriously, stop and reflect for a moment. Communism actually fails in real life. And I don't mean fails the way AT&T's customer service fails. I know it's not a realistic short term suggestion, but if you get the opportunity, check out Cambodia, the Killing Fields, and Security Center 21. Check out Saigon, and note that much of the infrastructure hasn't been replaced since the Fall of Saigon in 1975 (the fire hydrants are still almost all American-made - when they've occasionally failed, they're just removed and not replaced). Compare West Berlin and East Berlin for a stark contrast. Seriously. I don't know what to tell you. Communism is really, really bad. If you're in the West and have never left the West, you don't understand and can't understand. Go through a few of these countries critically, yes on paper, but also in the real world and see how bad things were, and how much better they are in sane places with private property and rule of law. I'm not writing this for my health - if you currently are sympathetic to forced-collectivism, I'd really encourage you to look at how it's turned out historically. If you're sympathetic to communism, I'd like you to stop that, because I think it's destructive the same way that believing in religious violence is destructive.
Andrew_Quentin 15y ago
This is the weirdest thread I have read in a long while. Some guy gets jailed because he does not want to sell his business and you call him a thief? And what did you make of the 1 in 3 prisoners are businessmen. Do you actually hate business per se? How are we to live if not by trading? Shall we all go back to farming and villages? I am furthermore amazed that you are the most voted. Did you forget that the Russians were starving in 1989? Whatever public property they might have had, it did not produce. So the bottles of milk were, back then, left empty, there were cues in the line for bread. You must have also forgotten that Russia went banckrupt. Ideology does that to you. But, you see, Russia had no money! If America goes to the point where it has no money at all, it too will sell the Washington Momentum and the public parks. They are public today, because of prosperity through trade, which allows them to afford such amenities. Now, what do you do when you do not have food, but have assets? You sell them right? Because assets without food are of no use. Especially if these very assets are meant to create food but are not creating it. So how does, turning a bankrupt society, into what now appears to be with food on the table, amount to theft? Oh, and have you spoken to your father? Has he told you about the public hangings? The hush hush neighbour informer, the gota go to the party rally. We do not do things for no reason. Man needs incentives. For more than 5,000 years other system have, and probably will be tried, but they have vanished to the footnotes of history. Have you seen the great civilisations? They all were centres of trade. We are not and we shall never again be, farmers. Now, try some philosophy. Information can be exciting, but dangerous too without some ability to absorb it by critically, practically, as well as theoretically, evaluating it.
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  starving in 1989 1) Some privatization and other social experiments were already underway 2) Some Americans (and hell, someone in just about every country in the world) are starving now. have you spoken to your father? Has he told you about the public hangings? The hush hush neighbour informer, the gota go to the party rally. I recommend reading about life in the real-life, post-Stalin USSR, as opposed to the Hollywood dystopia you are describing. You are in for some major surprises. Have you spoken to your father? Did he tell you about midnight War on Drugs arrests, of stoolies and plea bargains, and of prisons where HIV-positive anal rape is an expected part of a sentence? What, he never mentioned those things? Are they not "as American as apple pie"? Who is to say what the USA will be remembered for? The dead (empires or people) cannot speak, cannot defend themselves. Have you seen the great civilisations? They all were centres of trade. Who said anything about dispensing with trade as a whole?
olalonde 15y ago
Nationalization: Government takes X$ from your pocket to buy asset A of X$ value. Privatization: Government sells asset A for X$ and gives you back X$ (in the form of cutting taxes or spending it somewhere else). How is this theft? If I had to pick, nationalization fits the definition of theft better than privatization.
- waqf 15y ago
  You took as axiomatic that if government makes a profit of $X then an equal value will be returned to the people through lower taxes or higher spending. If you believe that, then a government can never steal [from its own people].
  - olalonde 15y ago
    Of course it's an oversimplification but it seems clear to me that if one or the other is theft, it has to be nationalization. If I steal 1M$ from a bank (nationalization) and give it back in 10 years with interest (privatization), I'm pretty sure I'd still be considered a thief.
dlitwak 15y ago
Most of what was "Soviet" was taken from individual owners in the first place. My family fled Estonia from invading Soviets, giving up several businesses. I visited a couple years ago and 4 families now live on the plot of land that was once rightfully ours. It's part of life, deal with it, we did. The making public of private land was also theft in the first place so I guess I don't quite get your point, he rightfully bought the land according to the laws at that point in time, he doesn't deserve to go to prison.
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  The USSR nationalized plenty of formerly-private land and natural resources, but it built its industrial capacity almost entirely from scratch. (At enormous human cost - which is the only way to uplift an agrarian backwater to modernity in decades instead of centuries.) The factories which were sold as scrap metal to the West for pennies on the dollar were fully public property.
philwelch 15y ago
There's privatization, and then there's privatization via selling businesses to gangsters. Personally, I live in a country that went the opposite direction and nationalized formerly private corporations. I don't feel any better now that the American people own AIG and General Motors, and will celebrate the day that these firms return to private ownership.
- wnight 15y ago
  Why? These firms needed money badly and someone stepped up to offer it. What do you care if it's a public or private fund? Of course we'd all be better off if loser companies were allowed to fail, especially banks. Bailouts should go to cheated customers, not the cheaters. ObTopic: Renting the resource to the gangsters wouldn't be half so bad as the outright sale. That's just ludicrous.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    What do you care if it's a public or private fund? If it's a private fund, someone else's money is wasted on buying failed companies. If it's the government, my money is wasted on buying failed companies.
    - wnight 15y ago
      Yeah, that's what I meant by simply not wanting the bailout and letting failed corps fail. I'd agree. Though imho using a tax pool, printing more money, giving banks 0% loans, etc, are all spending public funds one way or another. And it's unfair competition for the companies who didn't abuse the system and have been struggling to make an honest profit.

sili 15y ago

On the other side of the coin, there was little guaranty that most state run businesses would survive any way. Yes, some were bought up by by shady characters, dismantled and sold of by parts for profit. However, others were bought by the likes of the protagonist of the story who invested in them and made them profitable businesses. The alternative would have been for those companies to become abandoned, which means they would have been picked apart by the locals anyway.

asciilifeform 15y ago
there was little guaranty that most state run businesses would survive any way. Why? Oh, because their immune system, that keeps parasites down (the State in question) was murdered. That's right, murdered. The alternative would have been for those companies to become abandoned Why? As long as the natural resources to run the farms continue to be available (and why should they not?) and Russians still want to drink milk and eat cheese (they do), the farms would keep going happily ever after. made them profitable businesses It is possible to get high-quality milk and cheese into peoples' stomachs without American notions of "profit" being in the mix at all. Is the sewer system in the town where you live profitable?
- SwellJoe 15y ago
  It is possible to get high-quality milk and cheese into peoples' stomachs without American notions of "profit" being in the mix at all. The evidence of this assertion is significantly lacking. I know several Russian immigrants; who came to the US during the Soviet era. The difference in quality and quantity of food available in US supermarkets was a point of amazement for them. Honestly, I feel like you're trying really hard to play devil's advocate rather than actually believe any of this stuff. It's just too outlandish to believe someone would try to present the USSR as a successful, functioning, state. History has already given its verdict on the USSR. It was an abysmal failure. In fact, now that the walls preventing communication have come down, and people are able to speak freely about how things really were, we know things were worse in the USSR than we in the US ever realized at the time. People were poorer, corruption was worse, shortages of necessary goods were more widespread, the state itself was in a much more chaotic state most of the time than we ever imagined (the US feared the USSR, because of its perceived strength and unity of focus; but most of those fears turned out to be based on myth). Is the sewer system in the town where you live profitable? In some cities in the US (and probably Canada, as well), water/sewer is provided by a private, presumably profitable, company; private co-ops are also common. They operate under strict guidelines and regulations at both the local and federal level (for safety and to insure low-income families have access to clean water and sewer service), but it's not all that uncommon, and I'm unaware of anyone raising a fuss about privately owned utilities (power, garbage service, and communications, utilities are all frequently privately owned in the US and Canada). What's your point?
  - xxpor 15y ago
    > I'm unaware of anyone raising a fuss about privately owned utilities (power, garbage service, and communications, utilities are all frequently privately owned in the US and Canada) That's not true at all. Net neutrality? Muni broadband plans being blocked by the likes of comcast? Infrastructure should be state owned, because duplication is a huge waste, and there can't be a normal level of competition because the start up costs.
    - SwellJoe 15y ago

zeteo 15y ago

You seem to be issuing a wholesale approval of the Soviet economic system as just and moral. Are you actually serious? There's a very big difference between the Washington Monument and a dairy farm. A dairy farm is supposed to be an economic, well-administered business. You may wax poetic with Marx all you want, but history has shown conclusively that state ownership is terribly wasteful and inefficient. Yes, there were lots of difficulties implementing privatization in Eastern Europe, and it's hard to find a perfectly fair system for it. That doesn't make it a theft. If you want an analogy think of a bankruptcy - except the whole economic system was bankrupt in those cases. Without a switch to private property all those economies would be much, much further down the economic drain right now; when instead, some of them have recovered quite nicely.

asciilifeform 15y ago
history has shown conclusively that state ownership is terribly wasteful and inefficient. If history is teaching us anything here, it is that ownership by an absentee-lord (whether elected by Communist bureaucrats or stockholders, it matters little) is wasteful and inefficient. And let's not forget that efficiency is a false god. An economy that leaves the masses starving or mired in lawlessness might still be "efficient" from some theoretical standpoint (efficient in feeding those who are fed, in protecting the lives of those who are in the designated protected class, etc.) The USA is dying the death of the USSR: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dtxqwqr_20dc52sm http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dtxqwqr_20dc52sm And it will be remembered in the same way, as a brutal dinosaur of an empire, run by sociopaths, riddled by economic delusions worthy of the wackiest religious cult. Without a switch to private property all those economies would be much, much further down the economic drain On what evidence, on whose word, should we believe this? some of them have recovered quite nicely Financiers, mafiosi, and their lackeys riding yachts is not a "recovery."
- Duff 15y ago
  The US isn't a paradise, but we do have a system of law that is reasonably just and at least makes an effort to respect the rights of its citizens. As the US has transitioned to an imperial power, some rather obvious warts have developed, but the democratic republican (lowercase is intentional) tradition persists. Human society has shifted dramatically since industrialization, and we haven't perfected the system since then. The US and other Western nations aren't the ideal, but I think we're closer to it than the Soviets were or would have been.

mbateman 15y ago

> It is highly doubtful that fair compensation for the privatization of public property is possible even in principle. What? The state-owned dairy farms had a cost, covered by the citizens, presumably in the form of taxation. And they had a product: dairy. After privatization, tax revenue ceases to be collected for the dairy farm. People instead pay for the same products directly. Of course the criminal and the corrupt can interfere with this, and continue to impose the tax burden or some such, but exactly what compensation is incalculable here? The farm had a value to the citizens in proportion to how much value it generated for how much cost. And it still does.

asciilifeform 15y ago
Taxation in the Western sense was not key to the Soviet economy. You are thinking using the concepts of a world where money is the main unit of exchange. The USSR was not such a world. That country was run quite a bit like a non-profit version of a giant American corporation. Does upper management at IBM levy taxes on the Shipping Department or Human Resources?
- mbateman 15y ago
  Okay but you can at least go some way in translating my point in terms of valuations more generally. Different divisions within large corporations do have a specific amount of value, and are sometimes thought of as assets and even split off and sold. If you don't like currency you can use whatever metric of value you'd like. I realize there are a lot of assumptions about valuation, property, and/or currency built into my criticism that you or anyone sympathetic to Soviet-style public ownership would probably reject. But that's part of the reason why I pointed it out. You have to accept a lot of IMO implausible views to claim that a publicly owned dairy farm has incomparably more value to citizens than a privately owned one. You seem to be claiming that many Russians at least implicitly hold these views. I hope that's not true.
  - wnight 15y ago
    A publicly and privately run dairy both produce milk. That is their only similarity. The private dairy enriches only the owner, the public dairy enriches everyone. If your only concern is buying a widget then selling your share in the widget factory doesn't seem like a bad idea - they'll keep making them. But if you're concerned about affording the widget it's a horrible idea. As soon as your cash runs out you're widget-less. As such, and seeing as how this is pretty obvious to most everyone, privatization is theft in most people's eyes. There is no fair price when the government is selling our means of productions/resources for short-term gain. No sane person would do it, and no honest representative would do it for them.

SwellJoe 15y ago

Are you Russian? Still living in Russia? I ask, because I don't know any Russians (or citizens of former Soviet-controlled states) who want Russia to return to the way it was, though I think everyone can agree the current state of things is still frighteningly corrupt. But, my exposure is limited. Perhaps the people I know represent an extremist bent; the kind of people who escaped to the US when doing so was extremely difficult, and sometimes dangerous. Just like not all Cubans hate Castros regime, but nearly all the ones who live in the US do.

asciilifeform 15y ago
Still living in Russia? Moved to the USA as a child. I highly recommend exploring outside of one's ideological echo-chamber (all of us sit inside such chambers.) You will learn many interesting things! Many of my own political bits have flipped as a result of such exploration.
- woobar 15y ago
  >Moved to the USA as a child. Then you have no idea what you are talking about...
  - asciilifeform 15y ago
    So you won't read Gibbon, because he never even set foot in ancient Rome? That impostor. Most of what any thinking person reliably knows about the world comes from the printed word.
    - woobar 15y ago
      I agree. Unfortunately you did not back any of your outrages statements with anything but you being born in USSR. All I wanted to point out is that it is not enough.
      - asciilifeform 15y ago
        Out of curiosity, what would be "enough"? Can you even imagine yourself being convinced of the positions I brought up? (Are we dealing with a "religious" difference of opinions here?) And what kind of biography would the person doing the convincing need to have? (I only brought up my birthplace because someone specifically asked. I fully agree that it is irrelevant. However, there is the added caveat that much of the relevant material on the implicit question of "was the USSR irredeemably Satanic, and are its destroyers automatically saints?" - the material which collectively forms Soviet culture - will never be translated into English.)

theoj 15y ago

"this does not change the fact that privatization is theft. The former owners of Soviet facilities - the Soviet people - were not adequately compensated for their loss." There's also the original theft that enabled the existence of the Soviet state -- the theft of land and wealth from the former land holding class starting in 1917. The collectives were created from their lands, and they received no compensation -- in fact in many cases they were persecuted and murdered. Some excuse this breach of property rights by saying that the aristocracy was corrupt, evil, etc., just like today's elites are. It's only the communes and collectives who were "good" and whose property rights should be respected. Should everyone be equal economically regardless of merit? The guy who does nothing all day long, and the guy who works hard to build a successful dairy firm -- they all should receive the same salary? It is this type of economic thinking that ruined the USSR - when there's no reward for doing good work, then there's no reason to do good work. Why should I work hard when I can rest and get my guaranteed salary? EDIT: Please attack the arguments not the messenger. I've edited my comment to do the same.

asciilifeform 15y ago
you seem to believe that everyone should be equal economically regardless of merit. Interesting implication. It says a fair bit about you, actually. That, like most people on this site, you place every person whose thoughts you read into one of a small number of mental "boxes." I, for instance, am apparently a "Looter" from Ayn Rand's novels. Not everyone is a character from a morality play. Please try to remember this. Not everyone is an uncritical defender or mindless opponent of this or that fashionable doctrine. the guy who works hard to build a successful dairy firm How about the guy who works others hard to build a successful dairy firm? And his grand-children? What should they receive? This is the real issue regarding the aristocrats of any nation. According to some, the USSR began to perish (through widespread cynicism of its own foundational myths) when it finally built a fresh aristocracy of inherited privilege - the Brezhnevian "nomenclature."
- theoj 15y ago
  "That, like most people on this site, you place every person whose thoughts you read into one of a small number of mental "boxes." I, for instance, am apparently a "Looter" from Ayn Rand's novels." Notice how you placed all the people on HN in a single mental box. In the interest of fairness, can you tell me more about your outlook and why you believe privatization is theft?

lionhearted 15y ago

> One can debate the practical merits of planned economies all day long but this does not change the fact that privatization is theft. No, it's not. Theft is theft. Privatization is privatization. There's been some pretty poorly implemented privatizations in history, but also some decent ones. I'm in Mongolia now, and they did an okay job of it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Stock_Exchange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Stock_Exchange Still imperfect, but much better than the clusterfuck that was communism. Seriously, everyone remotely educated in an ex-communist country hates communism. I've been to most of them - Cambodians, Chinese, Mongolians, Ukrainians, Czechs... it's only people who live in the outstandingly, legendarily prosperous West that wax poetic about the horrors of that era. Seriously, I've seen a lot of it firsthand. I've also been to still-somewhat-communist places like Vietnam, and they operate a hell of a lot worse than their neighbors. Anyways. Generally speaking, trying to repair a massive, systematically flawed system is hard. It's like how the tax breaks on mortgage interest screw up American housing prices, making it so high earners have more of an incentive to buy housing, thus locking younger people, lower earning people, and senior citizens out of housing, or making them pay inflated prices. It's screwed up. It's a bad system. But unwinding it now would cause a cascading set of problems in the housing market. Thankfully, that poor system of incentives is limited to one sector of the American economy, whereas communism pretty much systematically destroys innovation, free thought, invention, and any semblance of sanity and order. Seriously, go compare equivalent communist and non-communist countries. West Germany and East Germany, Taiwan and PRC, Cambodia/Vietnam and Thailand/Malaysia/Singapore (not perfect comprables, but close-ish). Hong Kong and PRC. Oh yeah, and North Korea and South Korea. Communism sucks. Unwinding a broken system is hard to do, but thank god they're trying to move past communism. Edit: Lots of upvotes and lots of downvotes. To the people downvoting, look - Hacker News is, what, 80%+ Western Europe, USA, and Australia? If you're sitting at your computer in San Francisco, you've never been further out of the States than Cancun, and you've gotten your worldview from some professor of Postcolonial Studies that also has never gotten outside of San Francisco, then I don't know what to tell you. Seriously, stop and reflect for a moment. Communism actually fails in real life. And I don't mean fails the way AT&T's customer service fails. I know it's not a realistic short term suggestion, but if you get the opportunity, check out Cambodia, the Killing Fields, and Security Center 21. Check out Saigon, and note that much of the infrastructure hasn't been replaced since the Fall of Saigon in 1975 (the fire hydrants are still almost all American-made - when they've occasionally failed, they're just removed and not replaced). Compare West Berlin and East Berlin for a stark contrast. Seriously. I don't know what to tell you. Communism is really, really bad. If you're in the West and have never left the West, you don't understand and can't understand. Go through a few of these countries critically, yes on paper, but also in the real world and see how bad things were, and how much better they are in sane places with private property and rule of law. I'm not writing this for my health - if you currently are sympathetic to forced-collectivism, I'd really encourage you to look at how it's turned out historically. If you're sympathetic to communism, I'd like you to stop that, because I think it's destructive the same way that believing in religious violence is destructive.

Andrew_Quentin 15y ago

This is the weirdest thread I have read in a long while. Some guy gets jailed because he does not want to sell his business and you call him a thief? And what did you make of the 1 in 3 prisoners are businessmen. Do you actually hate business per se? How are we to live if not by trading? Shall we all go back to farming and villages? I am furthermore amazed that you are the most voted. Did you forget that the Russians were starving in 1989? Whatever public property they might have had, it did not produce. So the bottles of milk were, back then, left empty, there were cues in the line for bread. You must have also forgotten that Russia went banckrupt. Ideology does that to you. But, you see, Russia had no money! If America goes to the point where it has no money at all, it too will sell the Washington Momentum and the public parks. They are public today, because of prosperity through trade, which allows them to afford such amenities. Now, what do you do when you do not have food, but have assets? You sell them right? Because assets without food are of no use. Especially if these very assets are meant to create food but are not creating it. So how does, turning a bankrupt society, into what now appears to be with food on the table, amount to theft? Oh, and have you spoken to your father? Has he told you about the public hangings? The hush hush neighbour informer, the gota go to the party rally. We do not do things for no reason. Man needs incentives. For more than 5,000 years other system have, and probably will be tried, but they have vanished to the footnotes of history. Have you seen the great civilisations? They all were centres of trade. We are not and we shall never again be, farmers. Now, try some philosophy. Information can be exciting, but dangerous too without some ability to absorb it by critically, practically, as well as theoretically, evaluating it.

asciilifeform 15y ago
starving in 1989 1) Some privatization and other social experiments were already underway 2) Some Americans (and hell, someone in just about every country in the world) are starving now. have you spoken to your father? Has he told you about the public hangings? The hush hush neighbour informer, the gota go to the party rally. I recommend reading about life in the real-life, post-Stalin USSR, as opposed to the Hollywood dystopia you are describing. You are in for some major surprises. Have you spoken to your father? Did he tell you about midnight War on Drugs arrests, of stoolies and plea bargains, and of prisons where HIV-positive anal rape is an expected part of a sentence? What, he never mentioned those things? Are they not "as American as apple pie"? Who is to say what the USA will be remembered for? The dead (empires or people) cannot speak, cannot defend themselves. Have you seen the great civilisations? They all were centres of trade. Who said anything about dispensing with trade as a whole?

olalonde 15y ago

Nationalization: Government takes X$ from your pocket to buy asset A of X$ value. Privatization: Government sells asset A for X$ and gives you back X$ (in the form of cutting taxes or spending it somewhere else). How is this theft? If I had to pick, nationalization fits the definition of theft better than privatization.

waqf 15y ago
You took as axiomatic that if government makes a profit of $X then an equal value will be returned to the people through lower taxes or higher spending. If you believe that, then a government can never steal [from its own people].
- olalonde 15y ago
  Of course it's an oversimplification but it seems clear to me that if one or the other is theft, it has to be nationalization. If I steal 1M$ from a bank (nationalization) and give it back in 10 years with interest (privatization), I'm pretty sure I'd still be considered a thief.

dlitwak 15y ago

Most of what was "Soviet" was taken from individual owners in the first place. My family fled Estonia from invading Soviets, giving up several businesses. I visited a couple years ago and 4 families now live on the plot of land that was once rightfully ours. It's part of life, deal with it, we did. The making public of private land was also theft in the first place so I guess I don't quite get your point, he rightfully bought the land according to the laws at that point in time, he doesn't deserve to go to prison.

asciilifeform 15y ago
The USSR nationalized plenty of formerly-private land and natural resources, but it built its industrial capacity almost entirely from scratch. (At enormous human cost - which is the only way to uplift an agrarian backwater to modernity in decades instead of centuries.) The factories which were sold as scrap metal to the West for pennies on the dollar were fully public property.

philwelch 15y ago

There's privatization, and then there's privatization via selling businesses to gangsters. Personally, I live in a country that went the opposite direction and nationalized formerly private corporations. I don't feel any better now that the American people own AIG and General Motors, and will celebrate the day that these firms return to private ownership.

wnight 15y ago
Why? These firms needed money badly and someone stepped up to offer it. What do you care if it's a public or private fund? Of course we'd all be better off if loser companies were allowed to fail, especially banks. Bailouts should go to cheated customers, not the cheaters. ObTopic: Renting the resource to the gangsters wouldn't be half so bad as the outright sale. That's just ludicrous.
- philwelch 15y ago
  What do you care if it's a public or private fund? If it's a private fund, someone else's money is wasted on buying failed companies. If it's the government, my money is wasted on buying failed companies.
  - wnight 15y ago
    Yeah, that's what I meant by simply not wanting the bailout and letting failed corps fail. I'd agree. Though imho using a tax pool, printing more money, giving banks 0% loans, etc, are all spending public funds one way or another. And it's unfair competition for the companies who didn't abuse the system and have been struggling to make an honest profit.