Thus it makes sense if there is some variability in how “victimized”, “oppressed”, or even just “lucky” each man and woman felt.

I count people voting with their feet more heavily than people giving opinions, and I count people giving opinions after the fact less heavily still, and I count other people selectively reporting those opinions after the fact less heavily still.

This is not, I believe, particularly political correctness on my part; it applies to people apologizing for the Soviets in the same way that it applies to people apologizing for 19th century slavery.

(“It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable. Although it is undoubtedly true that few citizens of the west would trade their degree of economic comfort and political freedom for life in the Soviet, it is also true that a Soviet citizen thinks that he is living in a paradise in comparison with life in China or in earlier times.” — Samuelson _Economics_, “Alternative Economic Systems” chapter. And it is also true that they use barbed wire and mines and machineguns to keep their subjects from escaping, something that the chapter-length treatment declines to mention.)

A surprisingly large fraction of people may stay put even in bad conditions — not just political conditions, but natural disasters too. And almost no matter how bad things are, a surprising fraction of people can screw up their lives for themselves worse later. And there are all sorts of interesting and serious tradeoffs around ordinary slavery and sovereignty and surrender and conscription and debt slavery and so forth, and it’s easy to go from bad to worse, or to get to better only at such a high cost that it probably wasn’t worth it. But that doesn’t excuse the tendency to make laughable arguments about how good the slaves have it, and to stubbornly unthink how they are prevented from escaping.