János Kornai

But I mean, you just have to read Ram's essays to know that that's simply not true.

He's equally scathing about communists and socialists and some of the terrible things their regime has done, right? So the great, you know, political economist Janos Kornai called this the soft budget constraint, right? Which is basically...

socialist firms which are like completely nationalized have even fewer incentives to economize on resources because they have this soft budget constraint right so they are even less likely even a capitalist firm that has a hard profit constraint and is driven by market prices will have some need to economize on resources that's simply not true for socialists right so that's number one but there are some spectacular examples of environmental disasters right this is the I think it's called the Aral Sea, A-R-A-L, right? I'm sure there are like differing pronunciations.

There was an example where there was a particular desert that the Soviets wanted to irrigate and they diverted two river tributaries away from the sea to make this desert bloom, okay? And of course, the sea shrank dramatically because of this.