Carey: 'Strip away all the anti-Bolshevik propaganda, and you are left with a brutal, murderous regime, driven by a nihilistic, anti-human creed.' I presume Richard broadly agrees with the boilerplate neo-liberal criticism that the main problem with the economies in the former socialist states was that they attempted to impose on society an ideology which took no account of the need for market mechanisms in determining prices. (Incidentally, Stalin said something pretty similar: that while Soviet economists understood how the law of value worked in capitalist societies, they had failed to understand how it operated in socialist economies.) Yet, rather than retain the logical thread in his argument, i.e. that they tried to construct a society based on a wrong-headed theory, he instead says these societies were based on a totally destructive creed that believed in nothing. I'm sure even the 'great' von Mises would concede that the Soviet Union was not nihilistic, in any meaningful sense of the word, and that at its core it had the concrete aim of human betterment, albeit one it pursued in what he would consider an irrational manner. When you ignore such basic facts as the massive increases in living standards in the Soviet Union and the lack of any tradition of western-style liberal governance in Russia (both before 1917 and after 1991), preferring instead to carelessly throw around adjectives with no respect for what they actually mean, you simply show how far away you are from any kind of serious analysis. Moreover,