https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/kazakhstan-lenin-lloyd-billingsley/
Joe Biden’s nominee for Comptroller of the Currency in the U.S. Treasury Department is Saule Omarova, a native of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and graduate of Moscow State University, which she attended on a “Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship.” In a May 9, 2020 interview with Chris Hayes of NBC, Omarova explained how she arrived in America.
“I was an undergraduate student at Moscow State University and there was at the very end of the Gorbachev era an exchange program between Moscow State and University of Wisconsin Madison. I got lucky against all odds, and I came for that one semester in 1991 to Madison, Wisconsin. While I was there in December of 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart. So there I was, a student without anywhere to go back. I was very worried about what was going to happen. So I stayed to do my Ph.D. in political science, but frankly, I’m just, to this day, I feel guilty for having left the country at such a momentous time, because obviously they couldn’t hold it together without me.”
“Your departure and it all falls apart,” Hayes said. “That’s amazing timing.” As it turned out, unlike many other émigrés, Omarova remained a fan of the USSR.
In 2019, nearly 30 years after the USSR collapsed, Omarova was on record that “say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best.’” In the old USSR, the all-male Dictatorship of the Proletariat always knew best, but Hayes didn’t get into that.
As F.A. Hayek outlined in The Road to Serfdom way back in 1944, economic knowledge is fragmented and dispersed, so no group of people, is able to plan an economy that will thrive for the benefit of all. That’s why Omarova’s beloved “old USSR” was an economic basket case.
Countries barren of liberties are also barren of groceries. The biggest country in the world, with abundant energy and natural resources, could not even feed itself. This was a matter of record, but Hayes failed to press the issue. Omarova knew that in the old USSR consumers waited in line to select, pay, and pick up the goods. That is how an economy planned by Communist Party bosses functions in practice, but there’s more to it.