Apparatchiks

Izabella Łaba, who grew up in Communist Poland, wrote a long, fascinating blog post about the lived realities of socialism:

If I were to name the most “socialist” things that I see or hear about on this side of the pond – “socialist” referring to the reality I’ve experienced, not to the latest myth du jour – Obamacare or “big government” would not be especially close to the top of the list. (If you recall, the problem with the “big government” in the Soviet bloc was a little bit more particular than it just being big.) On the other hand, big U.S. banks and other “too big to fail” entities are pretty good analogues of the coal and steel communist corporation. Pork barrel politics. I’ve mentioned Wall Street already. Academic politics, in so many ways that it just hurts to think about it. But also bureaucrats and politicians who try to micromanage academic research they don’t understand and use arbitrary indicators of “usefulness” to evaluate it, much like communists instituted a set of “criteria” to control production.