>>Of course working with nuclear stuff is a little easier if you are willing to completely lay waste to a portion of your country considerably larger than Holland and poison generations of your people while failing to deliver the most basic goods and services and funneling most of your resources to a cynical kleptocracy. <g>
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>I'd better go to sleep now. I read this as "clinical kleptocracy".

Does that mean you stole sleeping pills from the hospital? < g >

I enjoy your perspective on this as you have direct experience of living in a 'workers paradise' ( or at least a soft version ) I think it is interesting that the real success was accomplished by people working at a local level in spite of the 'system' and a priviledged oligarchy.

Of course, corruption is another matter, and an interesting phenomenom culturally and historically. Here we've 'managed' it by incorporating it into our election financing. But our founders were wise enough to spread power in such a way as to make it less desireable because there are just too many people you would have to buy to get what you want, so even the most greedy or the most venal must compromise with the general will and interests.

I think one of the most interesting subjects is the divergence of political thought as it came out of the English and French Enlightenments. ( see the work of Gertrude Himmelfarb, for example ( who is - to digress further but at least I'm not writing it in binary - William Kristol's mother )

The French model ( and later, Socialist Utopianism ) required a New Man. The model worked fine if you just had better people. ( if that part didn't happen you got The Terror, the Cultural Revolution, the Gulag ) The Carlye / Hume / Burke / Madison / Hamilton model figured you had to design a government so if Man continued as he was you could gradually create a better and more just society by balancing powers and interests so if evil men came to power they could be thwarted or removed. Imperfect indeed and certainly not Utopian - but sustainable and subject to refactoring < s >


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>>BTW for all the "medical achievements" do some research on how many hospitals in the USSR did not even have hot water.
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>The true failure of XX century socialism is that it failed to protect itself from, as Lenin put it, "thugs in our ranks". It went so far that the thugs used the system to protect themselves (starting with that guy from Georgia or even much before him), while evading responsibility at all levels.
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>Even in the advanced soft system that we had, where there were many form of direct democracy at lower levels and a market economy, there was still pretty much nothing people could do against a thug, if the thug was a card carrying Comrade Thug with good backing. So on one end I went to an elementary school with perfect heating, new building, enough and well educated staff, everything squeaky clean and well maintained, with strict limits to class sizes (24 to 30, as was the standard then), with all sorts of extracurricular stuff - we even had a full photo lab, 8mm cameras and lab etc, while in the mountains they'd cram 40 kids from grades 1-4 in one room, 35 of 5-8 in another, and two teachers with just chalk, blackboard and a wet rag were the whole school. And nobody really checked whether these teachers were really educated, certified etc.
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>In my city there's a modern hospital, still unfinished, which is being built for about 30 years now. It's mostly built from a local tax that we voted in periodically - about 2% of your net income - and nobody knows how many times and how much was skimmed. Meanwhile, in the same yard, the old buildings (and I mean old - all of them are over 150 years) were just patched here and there. Cockroaches always find a crack. Most of the buildings are still in use - the new hospital works only up to 3rd floor. When will they reach the 7th, nobody knows.
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>Was anyone fired over this? Was anyone incarcerated? You're kidding me. Comrades, we must protect our cadre, the enemy wants us to fight amongst ourselves.
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>Then they'd change enemies, change the political system, change the parties, fly over from one party to another, and the percentage embezzled never drops. Some get caught, specially if their party is not in power at the moment, but most of the time they make a deal and it goes away. Even I can see that, after all these years of absence.