His vice president, she’s just not only a socialist, but kind of a Stalinist. Look at her speeches, most recently in California. This is a very sad time that we are living through, but the people inflicted it on themselves. I don’t know if elections were fair or not, but I think it’s very simple if you are voting for a socialist or you are voting for a capitalist.

https://mises.org/library/sovietization-america

Yuri N. Maltsev

Yuri Nicholas Maltsev is an Austrian school economist and economic historian from Tatarstan. He earned his BA and MA degrees from Moscow State University and PhD in labor economics at the Institute of Labor Research in Moscow. Before defecting to the United States in 1989, he was a member of a senior Soviet economics team that worked on President Gorbachev’s reforms package of perestroika. He is currently professor of economics at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He has appeared on CNN, PBS NewsHour, Fox News, CBC, and Financial Network News across American, Canadian, and European television. He is the editor of Requiem for Marx (1993) and coauthor of The Tea Party and the American Counter-revolution (2012) and The Tea Party Explained: From Crisis to Crusade (2013). He is a Senior Fellow of the Mises Institute.

Jeff Deist: We’re speaking in mid-September, and President Biden just announced executive orders mandating vaccines for many employers. As a former Soviet citizen, what do you make of this?

Yuri Maltsev: That’s awful. In the United States, fascism comes in the very strange form of an elderly dementia patient. Usually fascists are charismatic leaders, look at Hitler or Mussolini, but this one, what he’s doing is just unbelievable. He is a socialist, definitely, that he is mandating the private sector what they should do, what they shouldn’t do. Karl Marx in the manifesto of the communist party, he defined socialism and communism as abolition of private property and that private property can be abolished overnight, like what happened during the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. But it can also take a gradual kind of process and that’s what is happening right now in the United States. Private property is becoming like having a title to wetlands. You have private property, but you cannot do anything with it.

D: Biden brings to mind another kindly old man, Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom you worked in the late eighties as a Soviet labor economist. In your introduction to the Requiem for Marx book, you go in depth about how Gorbachev managed to absolutely snow the Western media and snow George Bush senior.

M: Yes, he absolutely did. He was portrayed as a great liberator, however, he was a Communist. From another hand, we should give him some credit because he was talking about socialism and giving it a human face, which nobody understood at the time.

There is this joke that James Bond was sent to Moscow to find out what’s happening there under Gorbachev and he goes to the bakery and there is no bread, and he writes in a little notebook “No bread”; he goes to the butcher shop, no meat, and writes “No meat.” There is a KGB officer following him and the officer looked over his shoulder and said, “A year ago, you would be shot for doing that.” And Bond then writes “No bullets anymore.” When there were no bullets, people stopped working, because under socialism, the only way to work is under a threat to your life or to the life of your loved ones, because there is absolutely no incentive to do anything. And that’s what Mr. Gorbachev did not understand.

In the beginning of his reign, Gorbachev sounded confused. For example, he was saying that central planning actually works, the problem is we never had a good plan, and so on. That definitely didn’t show him as he knew what he was doing. But definitely, he played some positive role in destroying that evil empire.

Today, we have Mr. Biden, who is building a new evil empire. I think that his vaccine mandates speech is just telling us that he is right now on a warpath. He is desperately looking for enemies and who those enemies can be. So, he picked up unvaccinated people as his enemies, because he lost the war in Afghanistan so dramatically. He completely screwed up the evacuation and now he needs to attract the attention of the masses to something else. That’s what I’m thinking is going on.

And they are also, I think, trying the water, to see if they can get away with this mandated vaccination, with forced vaccination, with dragging people into vaccination centers, which reminds me of forced abortions in China, then that will be the ultimate goal: your loss of freedom. If you remember John Locke, his major question was who owns you. Do you own yourself? If you do, you are a free man, and if somebody else owns you, you’re a slave. If you don’t own your body, then who does? The government acts as if it owns your body and knows better what to put in it. And now, if they will forcibly vaccinate us that would be the end of whatever we think we are living in and would be the beginning of slavery.

D: Let’s continue this Biden versus Gorbachev comparison, because I like it. You write about glasnost and perestroika being basically fraudulent cronyist schemes in practice, not at all what the Western media reported. You quote Gorbachev saying, “What we want is a planned, regulated socialist market.” That’s essentially what the World Bank types advocate today.

M: Absolutely. We must have this economy which is run by the government, not by the private sector. Everything Mr. Biden has been doing since his inauguration is heading in that direction, more regulations for everything, for industry. People don’t like his predecessor, Mr. Trump, but under him regulations were being removed, 20 percent of them, but Biden has restored everything that was removed.

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