by Helen Andrews at The American Conservative
The historian Niall Ferguson launched his new column at the Free Press with a banger, “We’re All Soviets Now.” His comparison of the United States in 2024 to Russia in 1987 offended Jonah Goldberg and Noah Smith, among others, but their criticism of Ferguson gets it backwards. The only problem with his column is that it didn’t go far enough.
Ferguson’s points of similarity between modern America and late Soviet Russia are—to condense a column of substance to a bare list—gerontocratic leadership; bloated government; lack of trust in institutions; high death rates; and “a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.”
Good points, all of them, yet in each case Ferguson soft-pedals his argument.
In the case of the economy, for example, is the most Soviet thing about America really that our projected federal deficits exceed 5 percent of GDP, as Ferguson notes? Ferguson bemoans that the “insertion of the central government into the investment decision-making process” represented by “the Biden administration’s ‘industrial policy.’”
Surely that’s small potatoes compared to the fact that one sixth of the American economy is devoted to health care, a sector where, as a recent piece by TAC’s own Jude Russo hilariously details, the numbers are all fake. The amount of money sloshing around insurers and hospitals is absolutely massive, yet the prices involved bear no relation to utility or even reality. In exchange for devoting such a big chunk of our economy to medicine, what do we get in exchange? The occasional miracle, and a lot of overtreated octogenarians and routine care at inflated costs.
Higher education is another incubus sitting atop the American economy. It employs 4 million people and is
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