Progressivism--Putin-style!

INTERNATIONAL: "Putin Lays Down the Law to Capitalists in a One-Company Town," by Ellen Barry, New York Times, 5 June 2009.

Putin just shows up in some one-company town, like some Tsarist bureaucratic version of Michael Moore, and starts demanding that the local businessmen resume paying their workers, whether there's work to be had or not.

A lot of debate in Moscow about how politically explosive these moribund one-company towns can become in the months and years ahead. We may have Detroit, but Russia's got something like 400 "mono-cities," as they call them--a legacy of the Soviet era.

Comments

[David Dunn]

I think most of these problems stem from the idea of economies of scale run amok. Stalin loved the idea of economies of scale, but failed to see how that idea drives up transportation costs and makes certain regions very dependent on the production of just a few products. With something like alumina or cement, low value to weight, transportation cost is critical. China had opposite problems. Mao wanted each province to be self sufficient for the reason that if they were attacked they wouldn't lose one province and then be without an entire industry. China seems to have done a better job moving away from their falacious economic policy than Russia.