Word: free
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...from it entirely -- may be traceable to the same unfailing optimism. In a culture that has long fancied itself a New World paradise, disasters seem impossible either to imagine or to tolerate. People expect to conduct the pursuit of happiness along a road that is straight, well lighted and free of bumps...
...your yuppie BMW back up. I know you're every bit as patriotic as I am. And like you, I believe in free trade: you should buy whatever damn car you please. (And, yes, I know your Japanese car may have been built here, and that your Miata, built over there, is part American because Ford owns 25% of Mazda...
...glut of cash, a so-called monetary overhang, which has ballooned under Mikhail Gorbachev because the Soviet government has run increasingly large budget deficits to maintain social peace by subsidizing prices for essential goods and services. The government prints more money to cover the gap, which in a free-market economy would increase inflation. But under the severe price controls of a command economy, the money has no place to go but under the mattress. Jan Vanous, research director of PlanEcon, a Washington-based consulting firm, estimates that by the end of 1989 the store of unspent, readily available money...
...Once unified by Moscow's tight grip, the countries of Eastern Europe are breaking free unevenly. Poland and Hungary lead the way, East Germany is groping to catch up, and Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Rumania remain far behind. As the participants -- even Gorbachev -- improvise from one day to the next, old alliances are being strained. "Almost overnight," says Adam Bromke of the Polish Academy of Sciences, "all the rivalries and tensions in the bloc that Communist orthodoxy had papered over for decades burst into the open...
...East Europeans will show him the way out of his own domestic morass. If so, he may be disappointed. The key ingredients for change in the Communist world are already well identified, the recipe lifted from a Western cookbook for democracy. Separate Party from State. Add opposition parties and free elections to State. Briskly mix in press, speech and travel freedoms. Top with rights to assemble, strike and form labor unions. Bake in oven turned to Free Enterprise setting. Then hope that the inevitable spillover of chaos -- including the inevitable hard economic times -- doesn't cause the Democracy Souffle...