Communism was always something of a shell game. They would rob from 10 areas and dump their resources into a showcase, highlighting the glorious achievements of the system while everything else fell apart. The area to be preferentially supported shifted fairly rapidly and, in the real world, there were always several emphasis areas and many more neglected areas. This shell game worked for quite some time until people noticed that despite all the great progress, everything seemed to be on a downward slope in comparison with capitalist countries.
The real question of today isn't whether Soviet style communism works. It clearly doesn't. It's whether the 3rd way, euro-socialism middle ground is infected with the same style of robbing Peter, John, and Mark to pay Paul shell game economics. Follow the link to this article over at Samizdata to see a sad portrait of how its happening there too. EU science is suffering vis a vis US labs and there is simply not enough money to actually equalize it but we can all make bleating noises about a crisis and temporarily we can raid funds from other budgets to catch up in a crash program... until the crisis is gone... until an army of budgetary termites robs from the science budget to pay for their crises.
Posted by TMLutas at January 19, 2004 01:32 PM