<a href=“http://www.cera.com/commandingheights/" title="Commanding Heights“>Commanding Heights authors Daniel Yergen and Joseph Stanislaw tell us that workers in communist Russia were not motivated to work simply because the government controlled economy offered no rewards for innovation. This they use as the basis for their argument that communism/government controlled economies were bad and capitalism was good.
And what’s truly amazing is that in this obvious comparison between the USA and communist Russia, they find the most significant difference to be economic. In one brilliant stroke they appear to toss aside the fact that the USSR was a totalitarian, insular society. Or, and this is an interpretation that might only come paranoid thinkers like Noam Chomsky or Michael Parenti, maybe Yergen and Stanislaw found that the average American and Russian had equivalent freedoms (albeit controlled by different means).