Monday, October 30, 2017

Tyler Cowen — That was then, this is now, Soviet-Russian media subsidies edition

$100,000 is exactly the amount the Comintern gave in the 1920s to organize a campaign against John L. Lewis leading the mine union. No, I am not adjusting for inflation, so in real terms the sum in the 20s was much higher. The Comintern also gave at least $35,000 to start the Daily Worker, again that is a nominal figure from the 1920s. The American Communist Party received subsidies too. Many other communist subsidies, media and otherwise, remain hidden or at least uncertain.
Furthermore, those earlier expenditures helped convert a large number of Americans and American intellectuals to actual belief in communism, or at least fellow traveler sympathies.
What is left unsaid is the amounts the US has "invested" in subsidizing the opposition in targeted countries and also in maintaining in power governments favorable to the US. See, for example, The United States spent $5 billion on Ukraine anti-government riots by Katie Sanders at PunditFact, March 19, 2014. This was to fund a coup d'etat led in part by neo-Nazis that was successful in ousting a democratically elected government. 

Let's get some perspective here.

Marginal Revolution
That was then, this is now, Soviet-Russian media subsidies edition
Tyler Cowen | Holbert C. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center

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