The people who pushed privatization were the ones who personally benefited the most from it. It went from semi-incompetent central command to completely incompetent private cronies with baked in government support in the form of contracts, outright thuggery, and geopolitical might. Sure they got cleaner pricing signals, but they lost everything that made them competitive. At this point, most of the privatized industry that remains is largely rent seeking (telecom et all), resource extraction, and the military industrial complex.
The argument is that what the USSR experienced is an accelerated version of what we're seeing in the US, since it didn't have the other social institutions to make the transition. The free market didn't win, it just paused its ambitions to cannibalize the only competition before continuing on the same destructive path that the USSR economy speed ran in the 80s.
> semi-incompetent central command to completely incompetent private cronies with baked in government support in the form of contracts, outright thuggery, and geopolitical might.
this doesn't exactly make sense when the people you call semi-incompetent were unable to meet basic standards of the modern world with their dictatorial powers and the crony economy that replaced them was able to rebuild the capital assets and replace them.
> they lost everything that made them competitive.
they were not competitive at the time according to practically everyone.
> most of the privatized industry that remains is largely rent seeking (telecom et all), resource extraction, and the military industrial complex.
why was a command economy unable to make extractive and rent-seeking enterprises work? why was a market economy able to sustain a military industrial complex (which is wholly parasitical) when a command economy was not?
> The argument is that what the USSR experienced is an accelerated version of what we're seeing in the US,
this is because the US is a mixed economy, not a market economy. the same process of parasitic institutions strangling the productive institutions is at play, it only takes longer because there are more productive institutions and fewer parasitic institutions in a mixed system than a command system.
> The free market didn't win, it just paused its ambitions to cannibalize the only competition before continuing on the same destructive path that the USSR economy speed ran in the 80s.
of course the free market didn't win because there was no free market competing. the mixed economy outcompeted the command economy because the market portion produced more value and the command economy choked on its own inability to effectively allocate capital. It is true that people who had the money came from market institutions and purchased formerly public assets in the former USSR. This suggests the question: Why were they able to purchase these assets and why didn't representatives of the command economy purchase the (private) capital assets in the west?
The argument is that what the USSR experienced is an accelerated version of what we're seeing in the US, since it didn't have the other social institutions to make the transition. The free market didn't win, it just paused its ambitions to cannibalize the only competition before continuing on the same destructive path that the USSR economy speed ran in the 80s.