> This is a string argument for the US being no more a country with the rule of law than China or Russia.
As somebody who has lived in the soviet bloc I get goosebumps every time I hear something like this. "Corruption is everywhere", yeah, sure. But how much? This like saying the pacific ocean has water, the sahara desert has water, so there's no difference.
That's nowhere near Soviet Union or modern-day Russia. For starters, there's virtually no reliable economic stats for the Soviet Union, because every level fudged numbers and no-one knew then and even knows today what the actual ground truth was. The TV series Chernobyl illustrates that very well when a high-tech German robot breaks down because Soviet authorities had told Germans "propaganda numbers" instead of true radiation values at the damaged reactor. There was so much lying at every level that eventually no-one knew the truth anymore.
Such level of dysfunction is simply incomprehensible to an average western citizen. The latest documentary series TraumaZone by Adam Curtis gives perhaps the best impression that is possible without personally experiencing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDA3hIsf7LA&list=PLSjQL8MYni...
The current Russian military fiasco is also a symptom of the same deep dysfunction. Before the invasion began, military units positioned near Ukraine sold their fuel to local population and then ran out of what they had left on the way to Kyiv. Many units were understaffed because they had "dead souls": commanders listed non-existing soldiers and embezzled their pay, thus no-one knows how many actually attacked Ukraine. Latest military radios turned out to be cheap Aliexpress junk that relied on civilian 3G/4G cellular network. Many missiles failed before reaching target because they were unmaintained: a small amount was kept in order for military drills, money for maintaining the rest was embezzled. Body armor is filled with cardboard, helmets can be cracked with bare hands.
Imagine this in every facet of your life. Everything is shit, but if you go around saying it, then you'll eventually get locked up in a psychiatric hospital, because "it's been scientifically proven that Soviet communism is the best system in the world and anyone who doubts it must be mentally ill".
The United States has one of the most fertile grain growing regions in the world. The Russian wheat belt is far inferior. The system of government in USSR and USG at the same time were not that different at the core, but the same bureaucratic decision makers in USG had a lot more flexibility and did not need to exploit the native resources to the same intensity as the USSR was forced to by lack of resources.
As somebody who has lived in the soviet bloc I get goosebumps every time I hear something like this. "Corruption is everywhere", yeah, sure. But how much? This like saying the pacific ocean has water, the sahara desert has water, so there's no difference.