My father says their economy was based on a defunct idea and Reagan outspent them militarily. What do you say?
They spent too much on their own military, and too little on civilian infrastructure. They set up a command economy, and sacrificed civil liberties to the security needs of the State. Similar to the reasons the US is losing the Cold War.
Reagan happened to be in office when it turned out Communism didn't work. Reagan didn't have much to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union; it collapsed on its own accord. China collapsed too, but it was in no such economic competition with the US. The only way it got out was market reform and investment in human capital.
I suppose all of those are good reasons the Soviets lost the Cold War. But the principal reason (and the reason others have pointed out in this thread) is that their economy did not work. It was a centralized economy with the central government making all decisions. The Soviet government did not have the benefit of free markets. Under the Soviet systems, they had quotas that had to be met. A factory had a quota of one million tanks, they produced one million tanks...didn't mean the tanks worked well. But the factory met the quota and produced one million tanks. Under the Soviet system of command and control economy, the central government just could not make effective resource allocation decisions which were and are made by markets in a market based economy. Bottom line, poor resource allocations is what brought down the Soviet System. The Soviet goverment could not support the inefficiency of the system. Republicans like to claim that Reagan was responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union. But in reality he was just in the right place at the right time. The Soviet system was ready to fall. I think he handled the demise of the Soviet Union very well. But he did not cause the Soviet Union to fail.
It seems that what was happening inside Russia has now been shifted back to what Russia was before, the USSR.
The Soviets lost the Cold War because of the attempt at a command economy. No matter how well educated they were (and they were as a whole very well educated), it was not possible for them to efficiently allocate resources as well as a system of regulated capitalism would. In addition to that, the command economy opened up countless avenues for corruption, and engendered a "bribery is good" mentality that they still haven't shaken off. Power corrupts, and certainly did there. That further eroded the efficiency of the system. It certainly didn't help that they were then giving money away to communist regimes elsewhere in the world. Eventually they found they could not support the bloated government that was in place on the meager returns their economy was generating. As for Reagan's role, it's disputed and will likely take 100 years to unravel. (I doubt it will will be settled within the lifetime of his partisan supporters and partisan detractors.) The best guess is that he sped up of collapse of the Soviet Union, but did not cause it. It might well have teetered and fallen on it's own in essentially the same period of time, but it seems likele it would have fallen eventually even without America massing its sizable debt.
While it's true that their inefficient economy was a huge part of it, nationalism within the USSR was also a major cause of it's eventual collapse. Most of the individual countries within the USSR came to resent Russia's domination and became more focused on taking care of their own citizens locally instead of doing things "for the good of the USSR".
The inefficiency of government labor...on BOTH sides. It just so happens communism as more government labor.
As with most things, there were several reasons. A lot of the major ones have been listed already and I will two more - first, the misguided concept that workers are just plug-and-play items and that any one can be replaced by any other. An individual might be an excellent baker but if it were decided that the current need is for more workers on the assembly line producing tanks, there is where the baker was sent. Eventually, the leadership noticed there was a shortage of bakers and might well send a brilliant and budding mechanic to work in the bakery. There was also no incentive to be an efficient worker. If you put in three times the effort as the person working beside you, it didn't matter - you both received the same pay. So the natural tendency was for production and quality to fall as everything headed more and more into mediocrity.
They invaded Afghanistan and attempted to defeat them through war. The beginning of the fall of all great empires.
Thats an interesting viewpoint. How many empires have ended after invading the Afghanis?Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Nice try, and despite your greatest desire to create a historical maxim, the fact is, NOTHING is absolute. There isn't a law of physics that says, "Invade Afghanistan, fade into history." The collapse of those empires was running apace long before they invade. Afghanistan just gave it the necessary push. Now, if you want to make a claim for the collapse of the American hegemony, then perhaps you can make a similar claim that, like Rome & the USSR, too much was spent on the military and far too little on infrastructure.* There is the faulty desire to paint an absolute, but the fact is, it's the spending in general on the military (through various channels: about $1 trillion per year) and too little on the home-front that is causing the decay. ~String *The nation is spending less than 40 percent of the $225 billion needed annually for the next 50 years to maintain the current system of roads, rails and bridges and build enough transportation capacity for a growing population, according to the 12-member commission, created under the 2005 federal transportation law.
Most empires in the region have invaded Afghanistan, and all empires fall. So you're going to get a pretty good correlation. The Mayans and Incas and Aztecs had other precipitating factors.
