Saturday, February 22, 2014

Vladimir Putin learns the wrong lesson from the Soviet Union's collapse

As I was watching the opening ceremony for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, a commentator said that Vladimir Putin thought the collapse and break-up of the Soviet Union was devastating, or something to that effect, and that Russia lost a lot of "good Russians." 

Bizarreness of that statement put aside, it deflects from real analysis of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991.

What we should make of the Soviet Union's collapse was that we saw the complete and utter collapse of a nation based on an idea: Socialism. 

The "former glory of the Soviet Union" was no glory at all because socialism -- no matter how many years and decades it will take -- always plants the seeds for economic destruction. So going back to it would be like a "dog going back to its vomit" (Proverbs 26:11), and fool repeating his folly.

One other point here.

We are not unlike the Soviet Union.

As Thomas Woods explained in his 2009 book "Meltdown": "[the U.S. Federal Reserve System] is dedicated to central economic planning, the great discredited idea of the twentieth century. Except instead of planning the production of steel and concrete, as in the Old Soviet Union, it plans money and interest rates, with consequences that necessarily reverberate throughout the economy."

We are in the midst of a grand experiment that will end in nothing less than devastation for a lot of people. As I explained in previous statuses**, the time for a "soft landing" was over a decade ago. We should end our foolishness now to avoid an even harder landing later.

**Originally written as a Facebook status

No comments:

Post a Comment

WCF Chapter One "Of Holy Scripture" Sunday School (Sept.-Oct. 2021)

Our text for Sunday School (also "The Confession of Faith and Catechisms") Biblical Theology Bites What is "Biblical Theology...