Liberal Forum

tharock220 » 25 Jul 2014 3:52 pm » wrote:
Technically Germany was still capitalist when those guys were doing their best work. Inventions can arise from socialist economies. The Soviets were the first into space. Still, you get more when you have the profit motive. The US blew the Soviets away because research was directed by necessity during the 50's and 60's. The Reds had a victory here and there, but they were never able to catch up. By the 1980's they were buying IBM computers because they didn't fully understand integrated circuits.

I would argue that the profit motive is as present and ubiquitous under socialism as it is under capitalism. It might suffer perfunctory camouflage here and there, but it never goes away - it's attached to the getting ****** bone, which is attached to the actual bone bone.

And I would argue that the soviets were a pathetic adversary against which to measure our innovative muscle, considering they went from an agrarian despotism directly into a fascist despotism with a top-down, utterly inorganic communist economic model. We had a healthy free enterprise economy which had spawned a massive and very competent and well regulated (at that time) capitalist economy. That the Russians managed as well as they did is a testament to the ruggedness of the Russian character. They're tough people.