‘Property of the Soviet Union’

If you read articles about the Soviet economy, a hobby of mine, you will only rarely come across references to the central issue of private property, which to a very large extent is illegal in Communist countries. Like football without rules, economics minus property soon becomes chaotic. Our media, which treat the subject so gingerly, seem to believe that property panders to greed, and that the Communists are morally superior for having abolished it, even if they have thereby incurred a cost in inefficiency.

Sometimes you will come across the datum, appended with all the force of a footnote, that the 1.5 per cent of the Soviet Union’s agricultural land that is privately farmed produces 30 per cent of its vegetables and 50 per cent of its fruit. But this is very much the exception. In the days and weeks following the death of Leader Brezhnev and his replacement by Leader Andropov, a number of articles about the Soviet economy appeared in the U.S. press, and there was scarcely any reference to the problem of property, as far as I could see.

TB

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Tom Bethell

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If you read articles about the Soviet economy, a hobby of mine, you will only rarely come across references to the central issue of private property, which to a very large extent is illegal in Communist countries. Like football without rules, economics minus property soon becomes chaotic. Our media, which treat the subject so gingerly, seem to believe that property panders to greed, and that the Communists are morally superior for having abolished it, even if they have thereby incurred a cost in inefficiency.

Sometimes you will come across the datum, appended with all the force of a footnote, that the 1.5 per cent of the Soviet Union’s agricultural land that is privately farmed produces 30 per cent of its vegetables and 50 per cent of its fruit. But this is very much the exception. In the days and weeks following the death of Leader Brezhnev and his replacement by Leader Andropov, a number of articles about the Soviet economy appeared in the U.S. press, and there was scarcely any reference to the problem of property, as far as I could see.