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Comment by mm321 | Hacker News Reader

With a corporation you can always quit but in the eastern block you couldn't do that because of armed border guards.

Hayek says that central planning of an entire economy results in dictatorship, because conflicting interests have to be resolved by non economic means that involves the pressure of a secret police. i think he was right, it doesn't matter how many computers you have for solving planning problems, there always remain conflicting interests when the big father in the ministry has to decide who gets the stuff, central planing turns matters of distribution into political problems

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"Hayek says that central planning of an entire economy results in dictatorship"

With some corporations becoming bigger and global we have to be a little careful that they don't turn into de-facto dictatorships either. Internally they already behave like one.

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely

the ezception that proves the rule.

You could, theoretically, leave the USSR, if you paid back what society had invested in you. De facto it was very hard to leave

You can quit your job. Except many of us de facto can't (H1B1, non compete clauses, etc)

Leaving Yugoslavia was probably easier than being an Indian engineer on an H1B working for a company with a non compete clause.

Btw, I don't think Hayek or any of the Austrians had very benign attitudes towards multinationals or large corporations: Begging for tax payer largess, ghostwriting regulations creating artificial barriers to entry, abusing immigration law to have a de facto slave. Mises and Rothbard would tut tut. And they were the hard core anti commies!

Yugoslavia and Poland where the two socialist countries where citizens were allowed to travel to the west. Exceptions: both countries were relatively poor and didn't mind a few people leaving (also in Poland (PPR) the government used to make consessions when it faced popular pressure)

I was not aware that Poland allowed people to leave.

Yugoslavia on the other hand, was more interesting, in the sense that it was not a part of the Warsaw pact, or a puppet state under the USSR. It was a 'non-aligned' communist state, and, after Stalin's death had passable relations with both the East and the West.

No, not really. Poles we're theoretically allowed to get a passport but in practice if one didn't have a good reason to go west and get back one didn't receive passport.

In '68 some Jewish-origin Poles were handed passports and one way tickets if they pleased (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Polish_political_crisis#E...).

Due to anti-semitism, jews were always a special case - they were not wanted across the Soviet block, and were occasionally 'encouraged' to emigrate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_Soviet_Union_aliyah

Yugo was way richer than Albania, and I doubt Poland was as poor as Romania. So wasn't just a "we don't care they're mere peasants"

Again, ppl were technically allowed to leave the USSR (and East Germany too). But it might take 10 years and you were a social pariah in the meantime.

You are right, it is hard to generalize: for example Albania did not dependent on Moscow at all and Romania even had its own foreign policy that did not automatically follow Moscow. Go figure...

You could leave the GDR - but you had to wait for the permit for several years and your ability to earn an income was severely restricted during that period; In the USSR Jews could apply for emigration since the seventies, and permission was very dependent on the current political climate and the whims of the higher ups.

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