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USSR as cautionary tale November 26, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : society , trackback

Over at Asymmetrical Information, Megan McArdle talks about Bryan Caplan talking about libertarians’ opposition to the war. In her post, she says:

“I’d say that the fall of the Soviet Union discredited several ideas on the left and the right: on the left, the idea that the state should own most of the means of production; on the right, the idea of isolationism, or non-interventionism. It is now patently obvious that if the US had not drawn a proverbial line in the sand through Germany, the Soviets would now own large blocks of Western Europe that would be struggling in the same way that Eastern Europe now does.”

Now, I’m not going to disagree with any of this as vehemently as some of the commenters over at AI. I think that the USSR does serve as a fairly good example of what happens when you give a totalitarian regime the goal of having a planned economy. I do think that if you tried the same economic plan with a different government plan, things would turn out differently (though not necessarily very well).

I think that it was pretty much all of the 20th century that put the lie to US isolationism — attempting to retreat back across the Atlantic after WWI didn’t do much for stability, whether economic or political.

Lastly, I wouldn’t say it was ‘patently obvious’ what would have happened had the US not taken a (much belated) stand against the Soviets: I think there were far too many factors at work to say that the US alone kept the Soviet empire at bay. However, without the US, the way the Cold War played out would have been different, but I think anyone who tries to make specific claims about how different is probably overreaching — no outcome is patently obvious when talking about alternative history in post-WWII Europe.

In the end, though, I think the USSR is a certainly good example of a cautionary tale — the USSR and all that went on around it, can easily be seen to play a central role in the politics of the 20th century. (And I’m not just saying that because I’ve got a BA in Russian Studies. Pick a major political event of that century and I’d be willing to bet that Russia* had some not-insignificant role to play.)

Keep in mind that the youngest men and women enlisting in the US armed forces today were born after the wall came down. We would do well to continue to discuss the ramifications of policy decisions of any and all countries made in the 20th century, lest they be forgotten.

*In whatever political incarnation it was at the time.

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