Moved to the USA as a child.
I highly recommend exploring outside of one's ideological echo-chamber (all of us sit inside such chambers.) You will learn many interesting things! Many of my own political bits have flipped as a result of such exploration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization_in_the_Soviet_... (Wherein we learn how it came to be that "the people" owned the dairies that were later sold to the subject of this article.)
So:
The history of the New World.
Had enough? Is the "winner" of the murder-Olympics still so clear to you?
How about after adjusting the slaughter-count logarithmically to account for world population growth? (You can't kill people who have never lived yet.)
I hope that we both live long enough to read post-USA texts on American history. I'm sure they will make for at least as exciting an afternoon of reading as the now dime-a-dozen works on Russian atrocities.
There are excellent reasons to believe that most Soviet citizens opposed privatization. In that case, the Western "democracies" lie through their teeth when they claim that "the will of the people was done."
The government represents the people as a whole.
If the people as a whole (i.e. the government) take something from one individual person, that could reasonably said to be theft. (It isn't necessarily theft, but it's not an unreasonable viewpoint.)
If the people as a whole (i.e. the government) sell something they own to one individual person, that cannot be theft. The nation cannot rob itself.
That's the distinction being drawn here.
Jesuitry.
If the US Congress sells its entire collective political power to Warren Buffett, who then becomes Fuhrer, nothing has been stolen from anyone?
If Buffett bought the Congress, he would also need to buy the Judiciary and the Executive branches before he would have the power of a "Fuhrer".
Furthermore, the states could then revoke their consent to be governed by the Federal Government, just as they have revoked their consent to by governed by other authorities in the past (see the American Revolution, the Articles of Confederation, and the Confederate States of America).
In practice, owning the legislature would probably suffice. There are provisions for a Congressionally-declared state of martial law.
Confederate States of America
This last one is a good guide to what will happen if a state were to "revoke its consent to be governed."
Where? I've read the entire Constitution and didn't find anything of the kind. And amending the Constitution requires the approval of 3/4 of the state legislatures.
I'm not thinking in such absolutes. Any government must balance individual rights against society's interests. Sometimes collectivization is reasonable. However, collectivization involves coercion and therefore should be employed only in extreme cases.
On the other hand, privatization is a deal between two willing and legitimate parties, with no coercion involved. Specifically the government is entrusted by the people to manage its assets, and selling an asset is a legitimate transaction.
The problems with privatization lie with the execution rather than the idea. Many governments don't properly represent the interests of the people in such transactions, either because of incompetence or because of corruption. But with governments' conduct, incompetence and corruption seem to be the rule rather than the exception.
> There are excellent reasons to believe that most Soviet citizens opposed privatization. In that case, the Western "democracies" lie through their teeth when they claim that "the will of the people was done."
In representative democracies, what "most" citizens think about a specific government decision carries no weight. If the citizens are unhappy with the government, they can protest and they can vote to replace the government. But it is crucial that making unpopular decisions does not revoke the legitimacy of the government.
How much good does this do you once the government has sold off the national infrastructure (and perhaps even its own sovereign powers) to mafiosi, foreigners, and their agents?
Where can you vote for reversing the destruction of industries which took 70 years to build?
Where is the voting booth where you can go to vote against having had your popular culture murdered through vulgarization?
It does a lot of good if you vote in a government that buys back said infrastructure. "Sold" does not equal "destroyed".
But let me address your more general point as I understand it. There is no system that will protect you from a government that makes terrible decisions that destroy the country. What is your solution? Don't allow the government to sell anything? That's like banning knives because knives can be used for murder. Or perhaps have a committee that decides what can be sold? Well the government is already such a committee.
The only "solution" I see is to decide the government owns everything, so nothing important can be sold by mistake. Well the evidence of the previous century suggests that this creates much worse problems than it solves. This system has been tried, and it failed.
Governments, and people in general, make terrible decisions. Some of them outright disastrous. The best you can hope for is a system that lets you minimize the damage. Today it seems that democracy and capitalism is the best combination we have for minimizing the pain inflicted by people upon themselves.
If you buy stolen property, you're pretty much screwed. If you get sweet deals from corrupt officials, you should get screwed too.
Then you have no idea what you are talking about...
Most of what any thinking person reliably knows about the world comes from the printed word.
All I wanted to point out is that it is not enough.
And what kind of biography would the person doing the convincing need to have? (I only brought up my birthplace because someone specifically asked. I fully agree that it is irrelevant. However, there is the added caveat that much of the relevant material on the implicit question of "was the USSR irredeemably Satanic, and are its destroyers automatically saints?" - the material which collectively forms Soviet culture - will never be translated into English.)
What I don't agree with is OP's blanket statements like 'privatization is theft'. So far the only argument to support his views were his childhood memories.
But it would be a waste of time, because 1) it would persuade no one - everyone here appears to have read-only minds on the subject and 2) most of it has never and will never be translated to English.
PS: And I know for a fact that it was not possible to "get high-quality milk and cheese into peoples' stomachs without American notions of "profit"" in USSR for any reasonable period of time.
If that were all he was saying, I wouldn't be arguing with him. I think Russia is a mess right now, and a lot of it has to do with the mafia and former KGB running things. But, that's nowhere near all he's saying...that was just the tip of the iceberg.