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Multiheaded comments on Politics Discussion Thread January 2013 - Less Wrong
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I'm no fan of rent-seeking corporations, but the actions Gazprom tends to get criticized over are in its dealings with countries which are attempting to leverage transportation monopolies against it. There aren't really any innocent parties in those exchanges.
Oh, I wasn't referring to that at all. What I had in mind was how it doesn't seem to put the vast rent it extracts to much good use in my own country. And how it (and lesser rent-extracting corps like Transneft) joins into the massive state-oligarchic system of corruption that we live under. But yeah, I wouldn't expect Western media to report much on its place in Russian economy.
Laughs I'm too ignorant on the specific matter at hand to continue this vein of conversation in any depth.
I can only comment on the general case, so I'll continue it there: I think in general Russia got screwed over in its conversion to capitalism. Not even the first time, either; a major incitement to the rise of communism was how it ended feudalism, by putting all the serfs in massive debt to their landlords to pay for "freeing" them. (Granted, their debts were discharged a few decades later, but that was less a fix than a band-aid at that point, and it's not like they got a generation's worth of payments back.)
Its modern patterns don't seem to have deviated much; take everything the state owned, effectively give it to the people who were already in charge (nominally sold to them, but it wasn't exactly like they were sold in public auctions; the auctions were pretty deliberately manipulated), and call it privatization because now they own it instead of the state, nevermind that very little has actually changed, except that all obligations that went along with their government roles were discharged in the conversion. It would be like if a corporation seized all its shareholder's shares and gave them to the board of directors.
I'm a fervent capitalist, mind. And I don't think Russia's conversion to capitalism, in the manner it was conducted, actually did Russia any favors. They should have stuck to the voucher program. I have some choice words to describe Yeltsin.