Word: ownership
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Reaching beyond the country's borders, Gorbachev has attempted to start joint ventures with foreign investors. The Soviets have proved flexible: the original plan, which insisted on majority Soviet ownership, has been revised to accommodate the demands of Western companies. Last Thursday at a Kremlin ceremony, executives of a consortium of six U.S. firms -- including Chevron, Eastman Kodak and Johnson & Johnson -- signed an agreement for as many as 25 joint ventures involving about $10 billion over the next 20 years. Although the agreement specified ways that profits could be taken out of the Soviet Union in hard currency...
Gorbachev's economic reforms, while radical, are nonetheless carefully circumscribed. He is not marching headlong to capitalism but is attempting to reinvent Marxism by creating socialist markets, socialist competition and cooperative ventures. Private ownership of the means of production (land, factories) is still prohibited. Individuals cannot hire workers with a view to profiting from their labor but rather must form cooperative arrangements. There is a noncompetitive banking system, and no stock market for financing private ventures. Most important of all, there is no rational price system: thousands of prices are still set by state fiat rather than supply and demand...
Where the N.R.A. has always revealed its nature as a paranoid lobby, a political anachronism, is in its rigid ideological belief that any restriction on the private ownership of any kind of hand-held gun leads inexorably to total abolition of all gun ownership -- that, if today the U.S. Government takes the Kalashnikov from the hands of the maniac on the school playground, it will be coming for my Winchester pump tomorrow. There is no evidence for this absurd belief, but it remains an article of faith. And it does so because the faith is bad faith: the stand...
...tenants and landlords. The tenants who do not wish to buy may still see a better-run building because their landlord, after having sold a few units, will no longer be as financially strapped as before, and because other units, now owner-occupied, will begin to reflect pride of ownership...
...made tenuous but still significant progress. Meanwhile, America's onetime enemies are either realigning or undergoing a potentially millennial transformation, or both. In China "modernization" is a euphemism for de-communization. Viet Nam is pulling its troops out of Kampuchea and liberalizing its joint-venture laws to permit greater ownership by foreign investors. Even the hermit tyranny of North Korea has agreed to cooperate with a Seoul businessman in the development of a mountain resort just north of the Demilitarized Zone -- a breakthrough that will probably mean more for geopolitics than for international tourism...