Randy’s correspondent wanted some smoking-gun quotes by mainstream liberals. I don’t have such a source handy (though I, too, have encountered mainstream people taking that line). But I did come across this article which collects sources by very well-respected mainstream liberal economists (Samuelson, who defined the profession for a time, and Thurow and Galbraith of the MIT and Harvard economics departments, quite liberal but not fringe).
Whatever you think of Dinesh D’Souza, who wrote the article, and his assessment of Reagan, the quotes are real:
John Kenneth Galbraith, the distinguished Harvard economist, wrote in 1984: “That the Soviet system has made great material progress in recent years is evident both from the statistics and from the general urban scene. . . . One sees it in the appearance of solid well-being of the people on the streets . . . and the general aspect of restaurants, theaters, and shops. . . . Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.”
. . . Paul Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Nobel laureate in economics, writing in the 1985 edition of his widely used textbook: “What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth. . . . The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth.”
. . . Lester Thurow, another MIT economist and well-known author . . . , as late as 1989, wrote, “Can economic command significantly . . . accelerate the growth process? The remarkable performance of the Soviet Union suggests that it can. . . . Today the Soviet Union is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States.”
This doesn’t fully respond to the request for more general ethical defenses of the Soviet Union, but it’s not too far off, since this is the sort of thing that economists care about.
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