In the morning, I wandered through a metropolis that seemed to have been built without the use of a spirit level or a plumb bob. People were dressed the way you dress to change the oil in your car. Not that they had cars... The few automobiles, with their styling 30 years postdated, burped smoke and broadcast rattles. I could have made a fortune – if fortunes were allowed to be made – standing on a street corner with a screwdriver and a wrench, adjusting carburetors and tightening bolts. I’m not picking on kids today for being young and dumb... They’re no younger and dumber than kids definitionally are. The problem is the circumstances they’ve grown up in. This isn’t the first time that American circumstances have led people to hold immature and stupid economic ideas. There was only one department store in Moscow – GUM (an abbreviation of the Russian for “Main Universal Store”). Here, you stood in a line to select an item... stood in another line to pay for the item... then stood in a third line to be told that the item wasn’t available. I was almost crushed by a horde of women shoppers rushing to a particular counter because it had been announced that a shipment of Bulgarian gym shoes had arrived.
The lack of competitive and innovative market forces was evident in the most trivial ways. Tip a Soviet “Cosmos” brand cigarette downward and all the tobacco would spill out... Although, this didn’t matter because the way a box of Soviet wooden matches worked was you’d take a match out of the box, strike it against the side, and the match head would fall off. Then you put the matchstick back in the box because it was just as likely to light when you struck it as the rest of the matches in the matchbox. I wish I could send today’s kids to Brezhnev’s Moscow. But it’s gone, replaced by Putin’s Moscow. This new city is, arguably, as bad or worse than the old one, but much flashier. In fact, Moscow is now so recognizably Vegas- like flashy that I’m not sure a kid could tell the difference, at a glance, between Russia’s evils and America’s errors and inequities. Failing international time travel, my second choice would be time travel of the domestic kind. I’m not picking on kids today for being young and dumb... They’re no younger and dumber than kids definitionally are. The problem is the circumstances they’ve grown up in. This isn’t the first time that American A Joke From the FDR Years MOSES SAID: “Pick up your tools, get on your asses and camels, and I will lead you to the Promised Land.” ROOSEVELT SAID: “Put down your tools, sit on your asses, light a Camel, this is the Promised Land.”
circumstances have led people to hold immature and stupid economic ideas.
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July 2021
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