Gary North: "On Replacing the Keynesian Establishment"

Essay:

"Murray Rothbard observed remorsefully after 1991 that nobody in the libertarian movement had ever sat down and devised a transition program for the Soviet Union, on the assumption that the Soviet economy would collapse, and there ought to be a program to make the transition to free-market capitalism. That had never been attempted. It was not implemented. And so the Russian economic system is basically a version of Keynesianism. The central bank dominates. Bureaucracy dominates. The markets are not free. The system is rigged. It is simply Western crony capitalism superimposed onto the old Soviet bureaucracy, which was what Lenin imposed on the old Czarist bureaucracy. Russia is still essentially a top-down bureaucratic economy, with productivity coming from the bottom. What is different today is this: with capitalism, there is greater productivity in Russia than there ever was in the Soviet Union or Czarist Russia."