Passages.

• Author: Hazlett, Thomas W.
• Position: Brief Article

Eleven years that shook the world

H.L. Mencken posited that 10 years was long enough for any one job. I have violated that rule only on the rarest of occasions--remember that each infraction requires more than a decade of consistent work. But, with this final column, I will correct one such violation. After 11 years--119 columns--this is adieu.

When I began musing for REASON in October 1989, the Berlin Wall stood tall and you hadn't heard of Microsoft or Cisco. The conventional wisdom was that the modest economic successes of capitalism were offset, more or less, by its socio-cultural poverty. Textbooks by Nobel Laureates predicted that the Soviet system would perform and prosper for decades to come. Pick your poison: the floppy-eared Big Government, with its cradle-to-grave cuddles, or the shiny jet-smooth power thrust of Big Business--opulence at the cost of justice, beauty, and (for those on Wall Street) your immortal soul.

The intellectuals set the odds in the Great Struggle of the 20th Century at even-up. Esteemed gurus failed to note that the Iron Curtain blocked traffic in only one direction. The flow of desperate people--masses of the poor, clutching only their dreams--excited few of those fashionably decked out in the interior section of the market economy. Instead, the wise men groused about corporate takeovers and produced epic cinema exposing the greedy irrelevance of the Reagan years. It was blockbuster stuff, and spiritually fulfilling.

Without a cheering section, there was no need for competitive economic forces to grandstand. They didn't. Instead, they proved their mettle in magical feats of technological transformation. Then they made tyrants disappear. Today's globe glows a rich hue from enterprise overturning doctrines of control.

In the 1990s dictators fell like dominoes. When economic competition with the West proved too much, the enlightened but nearsighted Gorbachev eased up. The mere loosening of authoritarian controls unleashed events that proved impossible to stop. The Soviet system--victim of a record-setting 70 consecutive bad weather harvests--retreated, sputtered, and splat. Five Year Plan no more.

The East Bloc satellites fell even before the Kremlin; when the tiniest cracks opened, humanity rushed through. Mound the world, the common folk took their cue. In 1990, the peasants of Nicaragua voted out the Sandinistas--nice try, but The People weren't buying The Revolution. They lusted to be Chilean marketeers...