Many among the young are too
identified with the pratfalls of "reform". Age and experience reassert
themselves through the ballot boxes - and with them the disingenuous
habits of the past. Many of the "old, safe hands" are former communists
disingenuously turned socialists turned democrats turned capitalists.
As even revolutionaries age, they become territorial and hidebound.
Turf wars are likely to intensify rather then recede.
THE TECHNOCRATS / EXPERTS versus THE LOBBYIST-MANAGERS
Communist managers - always the quintessential rent-seekers - were
trained to wheedle politicians, lobby the state and cadge for
subsidies and bailouts, rather than respond to market signals. As
communism imploded, the involvement of the state in the economy - and
the resources it commanded - contracted. Multilateral funds are tightly
supervised. Communist-era "directors" - their skills made redundant by
these developments - were shockingly and abruptly confronted with
merciless market realities.
Predictably they flopped and were supplanted by expert managers and
technocrats, more attuned to markets and to profits, and committed to
competition and other capitalistic tenets. The decrepit, "privatized"
assets of the dying system expropriated by the nomenclature were soon
acquired by foreign investors, or shut down.
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