20 million people were sentenced as criminals between 1935-1941 in the USSR. Half of those were executed. The other half were sent to labor camps and rehabilitation camps where most of them died. The gulag system provided a free work-force of millions in mining and timber industries in Siberia. All farmers were collectivized into labor units and told what to grow and were shot if they were caught stealing. By the blood of millions of people the USSR catapulted from a third world agrarian culture to an economic power. But all the agriculture and industry was taken by the state, and exports just made a few communist bureaucrats wealthy.

It seems that it really doesn’t matter what the system is. One thing is clear, and that is that from time immemorial there is always a gang of thieves who obtain the power necessary with which they can control most of the resources of a nation. Politics is the same in every country no matter what kind of system of control. It tries to dictate what is acceptable and how to be acceptable through propaganda, while politicians debate one another in fixed forums. With their henchman like Rupert Murdoch they dream of questions to address the answers they have already formulated and then circulate them on the evening news entertainment shows.

All state history boils down to coalitions that strive to gain power over the state’s assets. A state’s net worth is its natural resources and the ability of its workforce to create assets. It doesn’t matter if it’s communism or capitalism. They are opposite sides of the same objective, to hold power in order to gain can control of the nation’s assets. It’s why regulations that would benefit everyone, and that everyone obviously would agree to, are not even discussed in the so-called elected congress. People must have healthcare, drugs, utilities, banking services. But if a group of people can control the assets of any of these industries they obviously can get extraordinarily wealthy.

We have a modern equivalent of the boom and bust economic measures taken by Stalin in the 1930s and the American capitalist equivalent of the 1920s lacking the interest in developing resources and industry in America, and willing to use its power over the Congress and the President to pass laws not only making it legal to fire its labor force and profit from cheap labor, but in an added measure of outrageous audacity allows these companies tax breaks for doing so. Governments are pretty much the same. They hide behind quantitative figures, ignoring the individual elements that make up the totality behind the methods utilized to achieve success.