Joe, your post, “A win for the whiners“,
pointed out something I have known for years from first-hand
experience: when it comes to economics it is difficult to find a more
ignorant bunch than newspaper editorial writers, unless it’s reporters
themselves.
The most graphic display of this ignorance was in the
immediate post-communism phase in the old Soviet Union. A national
reporter, who shall remain nameless, went to Russia and wrote nothing
but doom and gloom about pensioners being left out in the cold and
state payrolls not being met. She bemoaned the “ugly” makeshift stores
lining the road north of Moscow as “blight,” not understanding that
this was evidence of a vibrant private economy taking root.
My
favorite, though, was her visit to a collective farm that had chosen to
remain state-owned. People working there could barely get by, the
fields were in a mess and equipment was rusty and unused. Meanwhile,
literally across the highway, there was a collective farm that had
privatized and was making a profit of several million rubles a year.
It’s equipment was shiny and new and its housing for workers was
renovated. Somehow she saw this as an example of the new “pirate”
capitalism that was leaving behind the people who insisted on remaining
in the state collective system. Better, I guess, that all should be
miserable on collective farms than others prosper.
