Who, whom?

Is capitalism working for you, or are you working for capitalism?

Be honest.

The wageslave never fails to reveal himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_oligarch

Let me tell you, slave: I would give anyone anything to have been in business in Russia in the nineties.

”The so-called voucher-privatization program of 1992-1994 enabled a handful of young men to become billionaires, specifically by arbitraging the vast difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities (such as natural gas and oil) and the prices prevailing on the world market.”

Someone said that exact thing in a documentary I once saw.

He was right.

By G-d, he was so right.

A few years ago I was very surprised to discover that Russian GDP plummeted after Soviet communism was replaced by Summers Harvard neoliberalism, i.e., arch-capitalism.

GDP, of course, was not the only thing affected. Life expectancy plummeted also. People went hungry. Women stopped having children. There was no work. Millions of men literally drank themselves to death.

When I found most interesting is that the books I had read about the miserable state of the Russians invariably attributed these things — many practically unheard-of before the nineties — to the Soviet system…d.1991.

“Glitch in the matrix.”

Much in the way that the Communist interregnum in Russia turned the Russian people into a bunch of slacker sneak-thieves that all had a side-fiddle going on, the Koreans responded similarly to many of the same pressures–To survive, you had to become a thief at all levels. Thus, the anecdotes about “Slicky-boy” and all the rest. As late as the 1990s, you had issues with social trust when it came to a lot of Koreans. Not only were they likely to rob you blind out in the field (we had special guards and precautions taken to prevent our gear and equipment going missing when in the field…), but in garrison, they’d rip you off almost as a matter of course. The time I spent as an acting supply sergeant was a flat-out nightmare, and it wasn’t until I started telling people in front of my Korean KATUSA clerk that I’d contacted Criminal Investigations to involve itself that much of my expensive pilferables started returning to the supply room shelves…

Totalitarian regimes like the Communists and whatever the hell the Imperial Japanese were doing in Korea tend to corrupt their victims, resulting in a level of social criminality that flatly boggles the mind. There’s a destruction of the social contract and even self-interest that goes on, and many of the victims turn into life-long kleptos, stealing things that nobody would ever steal anywhere else.

Korea came out of that during the 1990s. My tour there during the ’91 time frame, we had nothing but trouble with “Slicky-boy” stealing. We even caught a guy who jumped into a baggage truck at a stop light, and was burrowing through people’s gear…

By about 2000, though? None of that was going on. I did my second tour, and the first field exercise I was doing all these things that had been mandatory during my first tour over there, and everyone was looking at me like I was crazy. “That doesn’t happen any more…”.

So, economic prosperity and no totalitarian BS? People behave better. Or, so I surmise…