I believe that the experience of the Cold War demonstrates that freer is better because over its course for 40 years a block of generally free countries (the West) faced a similarly-sized block of almost entirely unfree countries (the East).  As well as being freer, the people in the West were much better off.

Less free?

Yes, if you spoke up against the state you, generally speaking ended up in jail - at best; the state owned just about everything

What makes you think that Westerners were better off?

Oh, a few things like:

• Some friends who went to East Berlin and found nothing to buy
• A friend who went to Poland.  He went to pour a glass of water from the tap.  His friends had to shout at him to stop.  In Poland, tap water wasn’t safe
• Trabants
• the fact that the East had to build an elaborate set of barriers (the Berlin Wall being one of them) to prevent their citizens from leaving
• the extraordinary efforts that Easterners would make to circumvent these barriers, including, in one case, building themselves a hot air balloon
• the legendary food queues
• an acquaintance who told me that the apartment blocks stank
• this posting (quoting leftie Chris Bertram) provides further corroboration

But maybe that was because the East started off poorer?

But then, if its system was so much better you would have expected them to have caught up or at least to have shown signs of catching up.  In the same time period other countries, such as Japan and South Korea not only caught up but overtook some countries in the West and they started off from a much lower level.

But some people say that Eastern Europeans became much worse off when they adopted capitalism?

The term “capitalism” tends to get bandied about whether it is true or not.  Crucially, one has to determine how free people were after the fall of communism.  In many cases it took quite some time for people to become significantly freer.
A free economy takes a while to bear fruit

Permalink • General • Last Updated: 10 January 2007

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