Actually, freedom only carries you as far as your wallett allows.

Despite having lived in the West since I was four years old, I have never been to NY because money in that category was never over. So the freedom of movement is limited by the money available.

Freedom of speech is also not absolute. Ask those who questioned the Vietnam War. They found themselves on the outer time and time again, never knew if they were on a blacklist, sidelined by competitors or whether they should have regarded themselves as lifelong morons who don’t cut the mustard.

Freedom of association needed to be taken with a grain of salt, too.
I had friends from my childhood in West Berlin who turned into system opponents in adulthood and I never visited them again after I had that suspicion. I imagined there could be a raid (Baader Meinhof period) while I happened to be there and then I would be on file…………

Right to an education? In East Germany youngsters from an academic household often had difficulty getting into university because children with a peasant and labourer background were given preference. In the West, university education depended on the willingness of the parents. My father did not like to pay for his offspring, my mother said it was the father’s call to fund education. I had to drop out of university because I had an empty wallett. I could not get a scholarship because my father was not poor. I could not get a loan, because I had no collateral. Theoretically, I could have taken my father to court, but I did not have the money to do so.

Then came reunification with the Western Colluding Class pocketing assetts in the former East without compensation. I had the freedom to take the German state to court, but not the money to do so.

The West has a very long way to go before we break into jubilation, because a person’s freedom does not depend on those rights which are written on paper but on what’s in your wallett.
Get a grip, get out of your gated communities and take a look what life is like without the priviledge of a big bank account!

To survive in capitalism you must have capital, and unfortunately, that is not open to everybody. Sometimes parents don’t give a damn and do not provide a proper education or they are possessionless and the child misses out on support and shot in the arm. Without capital, life is no picnic. I think, many Americans will experience that in 20 years or so after the wipe-out of the GFC.

I grew up in the West Berlin of before the Wall and after, so I am reasonably familiar what happened then. Their system was always going to go bankrupt, as my father maintained from 1948, who had some experience with the Kommandantura.

East Germans could only exercise that freedom of movement because West Germany accepted them in, all of them. Since then, world population has more than tripled and no country can be expected to tolerate willy nilly freedom of movement of millions. You can always stack them like in a Mumbai slum, but if the host people want to retain a quality of life, housing, roads, schools, desalination plants need to be funded and built, which happens at a slower pace that people can move. And then there is the little thing of jobs.

Times have changed, and I for one, am not prepared to share my house so other people can have freedom of movement. This is the cold reality unless you accept rationing of housing as Germany had in those days. In my godmother’s flat of maybe 130 sqm there had to live 15 people, sent by the the government housing department.

The communist system had many inbred injustices. They took our land in East Berlin ‘away’. It was not returned to us or compensated after the Wall fell, so Ulbricht or Kohl government, same difference. What purpose democracy if it washes up people like Helmut Kohl?

If I could obtain justice, I would sign my democratic right to vote away, although after my brother’s suicide it is now too late for him.

It’s not as simple as democracy and capitalism are all benign and communism is all bad. Communism in its early definition, put the common good first. It then deteriorated, but in the Soviet Union they pushed the rate of illiteracy from 90 % in about 1890 to near zero.

From what I read on the German net, former East Germans still live with unpleasant constraints in 2009. Different constraints, but constraints nonetheless.

Before the change they could not get a passport to look at New York. Now they can get a passport, but they do not have the capital to do such a trip and then they get these freefall capitalists who steal or defraud them of their land, or who have no shame to pay labourers 1 Euro 50 cents per hour. FREEDOM! freedom to steal and defraud. The marriage of democracy and capitalism has created a Colluding Class and only if that can be addressed will there be gain.

PS: We actually did not have true democracy in West Berlin. Legislation made in Bonn was endorsed by the City government. They sent delegates to Bonn who had advisory roles, but were not eligible to vote. We never voted for Bundestag Parliamentarians.

Communism has enough blood on its hands without throwing every crime committed by a Russian under the rubric “crimes of Communism.” The raping of German women was roundly supported and practiced by Soviets of all ideological beliefs and actually criticized by the more devout believers of Communism. I find it hard to believe a different Russian regime would have behaved much differently under the circumstances. The forced labor and the treatment of German prisoners in the USSR is arguably a Communist specific crime, but the initial horrors of the occupation owe more to the quality of the soldiers than the ideology of the regime.

Ricardo- There were more than some stringy Marxists teaching economics at Harvard. Paul Sweezy used Stalin’s book as a text and changed his doctrine in lockstep. Harry White was an actual Soviet Spy. Teddy Roosevelt called Frankfurter a Bolshevik. Schumpeter was a plain old Marxists, but taught for 20 years. There’s more, and that’s just the Harvard economics department.

The point is wide, influential swathes of the U.S., especially its intellectual and artistic classes, believed that communism was the future and was superior to the U.S. model. The residue of that affectionate belief in communist permanency and legitimacy remained within those groups well into the 1980s.

It is actually true that Communist governments created incredible growth, for a while — they moved millions of workers from farms to cities, built schools, universities, and factories, put women to work outside the home, and made everyone work longer hours. That is “input” growth, and it is real economic growth, and it does raise standards of living to some extent. But when that transition was complete, the input growth ended: asociety can only make that agricultural-to-industrial transition once. Communist systems do a very poor job of creating productivity growth, which is the kind of economic growth we usually think of in the West — growth based on the increasingly better management of inputs.

All that may seem obvious in retrospect but it took Western economists well into the 1960s to work out why Communist economies experienced such tremendous growth after WWII.

Bush was absent from the 60th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz in 2005 — he sent Cheney instead. So what?

Constantin: Wall coming down was nothing to get worked up about. If it were otherwise, Obama would have been there for the celebration today.

Re the wall, he would have voted “present”.

MY BAD!

Sorry, I MEANT please see my post on the Berlin Wall in “Orin Kerr’s” November 9, 2009 9:46 pm Post

He was not only responsible for mass murder, he personally beat old men and old women to death with a base ball bat.

And FYI Che’s skills at military command skills were absolutly terrible.

LAST – Please see my post on the Berlin Wall which Ilya Somin posted on November 10, 2009 12:18

Most kids don’t know that Che was a ruthless executioner. I would never wear anything Che. But he was extraordinarily brave and charismatic, adventurous and photogenic. It’s not hard to see why he became an idol.

Pre-Revolution Cuba is actually a good example of why it’s incorrect to equate capitalism with democracy. The country under Batista was capitalist, but not at all democratic.

wm13: Surely what Prof. Somin characterizes as the position of “a few writers” is the majority position among American university professors. I think it is a little disingenuous how the Conspirators always act as if the evil is out there, when their world is the central generator of it.

Oh, thank you: I had almost forgotten that all academics are lefto/leninists. Including all the libertarians who blog on VC.

guy in the veal calf office: That’s a straw man, its more relevant that many people thought communism wasn’t so bad, that it was the wave of the future, etc. Ivy League economic departments taught communism as an equal rival of capitalism. Paul Samuelson (Current Washington Post columnist & Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences recipient) and every single person who wears Che Guerva memorabilia is part of that benighted group.

What Paul Samuelson said was that the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries had found a way after WWII to “deliver the goods” to their people. He was wrong as he put too much weight on the bogus government statistics of these countries. A similar issue comes up in the debate over China today: China’s official GDP growth statistics are much higher than would be expected given observed electricity consumption.

Neither Samuelson nor anyone else at “Ivy League economics departments” (aside from the token Marxist theorist that some departments have) ever said Communism was a desirable system or that Communist governments were not guilty of atrocities against their people. And that, as Somin rightly points out, is the real issue. Even if Communism were able to give people a high standard of living, it would still be wrong because of the coercion and loss of freedom it entails.

and every single person who wears Che Guerva memorabilia is part of that benighted group

I’m 99.9% certain that my daughter purchased her Che T-shirt because she thought the silk screen of his face looked hot, rather than because she had any ideas at all about economics when she bought it on the street in NYC several years ago.

Also, of course, one cannot discount the ‘cool name’ factor.

IS writes:

Cold War-era Berlin was the most visible demonstration of the superiority of capitalism and democracy over communism and dictatorship. Despite the fact that East Germany had one of the highest standards of living in the Soviet bloc, it had to build a wall to keep its people from fleeing to the capitalist West.

But there are economies that are not capitalist – according to many here on VC – in democratic polities. Further, there is at least some reason to believe that people tried to flee the GDR because of lack of democracy, abuse of power by the Party, and suppression of basic liberties rather than, or as much as, because of the non-capitalist economy.

“Straw man” in VC lingo means that someone isn’t making the argument you’d like them to make.

Prof. Somin wrote that lots of people in the West thought that people were voluntarily choosing to live under Communism. Responding to exactly what he wrote isn’t a strawman, even if you would have written something different in his place.

The Berlin Wall was important for what it symbolized, not just for keeping East Germans out of West Berlin.

That’s a straw man, its more relevant that many people thought communism wasn’t so bad, that it was the wave of the future, etc. Ivy League economic departments taught communism as an equal rival of capitalism. Paul Samuelson (Current Washington Post columnist & Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences recipient) and every single person who wears Che Guerva memorabilia is part of that benighted group.

Somin’s argument is essentially that focusing on the Berlin Wall somehow diminishes other issues involving the Soviet Union and its satellite states.

But, by this same logic, wouldn’t focusing on crimes by communists diminish the seriousness of crimes by others? For example, does focusing on the crimes of communists somehow diminish the Holocaust?

By this same logic, wouldn’t reading the story of Anne Frank diminish other atrocities committed by Nazi Germany?

The logic is simply wrong. Talking about the abuses by communists does not diminish abuses by others, but instead has a tendency to open up a discussion of these other abuses, as the previous thread on the crimes of communism illustrates. (Which I thought was interesting, despite some less than insightful commentary by some.) Reading the story of Anne Frank does not diminish the importance of other atrocities. If anything, it creates an opening to discuss these other issues. Likewise, the Berlin Wall does not diminish other abuses by the Soviets, but rather brings attention to the topic and creates an opening to discuss these other issues.

There is not some sort of exclusivity here. Talking about the Berlin Wall does not prevent the discussion of related issues. In fact, discussing the Berlin Wall makes discussion of related issues more likely.

Krushchev: The U.S. exploits the wealth of other countries, underdeveloped countries for profits. England and France do the same. We do not exploit any country—we only engage in trade.

Walter P. Reuther: You exploit the workers of East Germany.

K.: Where did you dream that up?

Reuther: If you don’t exploit them, why should 3,000,000 of them cross the border into West Germany?

K.: You are hopelessly sick with capitalist fever.

…

Karl Feller: The Communist Party proclaims itself to be the liberator of the working class; yet we see mass exodus of workers in other countries following the Communist seizure of power. Can you tell us of a single instance where there has been a mass influx of workers from surrounding non-Communist countries into the Communist country?

K.: Is that all? Think it over. Drink your beer. Perhaps that will help you to find the answer to your question.

Yeah, who knew? I’m sure there were many, many, many people in the West who thought that the people of East Germany loved communism, and that the wall was just there for no reason. Or maybe the number of dupes who felt that way is being grossly exaggerated.