The USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US (2006)

I think this gets at the core of what we see going on today and will continue to see:

"Just look around you, and you will see boondoggles sprouting up everywhere, in every field of endeavor: we have military boondoggles like Iraq, financial boondoggles like the doomed retirement system, medical boondoggles like private health insurance, legal boondoggles like the intellectual property system. The combined weight of all these boondoggles is slowly but surely pushing us all down. "

And then when I read this:

"I want to make a boondoggle that runs on hydrogen" – by all means encourage him! It's not as good as a boondoggle that burns money directly, but it's a step in the right direction."

I couldn't help think of that we'll come out this all right if we have the ingenuity to create boondoggles without realizing by simply adapting to the larger movements of the economic system.

P.S. who wants to help me with my boondoggle to get the name, location, and place of employment of people by simply visiting any webpage? I already have an mvp! :P

"Certain Soviet state enterprises were basically states within states. They controlled what amounted to an entire economic system, and could go on even without the larger economy." (explanation for slide 25)

No, they didn't! The planned economy of Soviet Union also planned an intentional dependency among enterprises over the most of the territory. After the collapse, especially after republics' separation, lots of mammoth industrial compounds got stranded, deprived of much of the previous supply and demand and just rooted or struggled for a while on state support bankrupting it in the end.