The Free Market 9, no. 8 (August 1991)
The debate over whether or to what extent we should bail out Gorby ($10 billion? $50 billion? $100 billion? Over how many years?) has almost universally been couched in false and misleading terms. The underlying concept seems to be that the United States government has, through some divine edict, become the wise and benign parent of Gorby/the Soviet Union, which, in its turn, has for most of its career been a wild and unruly kid, but a kid that is now maturing and showing signs of taking its place as a responsible member of the family.
It is supposed to be up to the parent, engaged in a behavioristic reward/punishment form of raising said kid, to mete out a reward/punishment scheme so as to reward improvement and to punish (by rewarding less—it’s a very progressive form of child-rearing) any regression back to the wild-kid state. And in tune with modern mores, the “rewards” are exclusively monetary, that is, to put a candid face on it, we are. engaged in a process of bribing the kid to be good.
And so the debate,within the circle of “parents” of the Soviet Union which all Americans have willy-nilly become, runs along these lines: Gorby did wonderfully, and freed Eastern Europe and began to free itself makes color an official category and orders discriminatory treatment.
