What was really the source of this Cold War?

It wasn’t just geopolitical. The Soviet Union wasn’t a trade rival or an investment rival. It was a different economic system. And that’s what led the United States to start the Cold War right away in 1917. As soon as you had the Bolshevik Revolution there, the U.S., along with England, tried to invade Russia and overthrow the revolution.

The whole fight against communism, they didn’t say it’s against the Soviet Union or the Russian people or Russian production. It was against communism.

And the threat of communism, what was it? The Americans feared that it was an alternative economic organization to that of American finance capitalism. And in the negotiations in 1944 and 1945, leading up to the World Trade Organization creation, the International Trade Organization, the U.S. negotiators said, “how are we going to deal with a socialist economy?” Because socialist economies are lower cost than Western capitalist economies.

Socialist economies are more efficient because they don’t have a predatory financial class. They don’t have a real estate class. Their housing costs are much lower because you don’t have an absentee landlord class that is able to maximize its land rent. You don’t have debt. The government of Russia simply creates the money.

Well, we all know that the Russian system really wasn’t a workable economic threat to the West because it was basically, under Stalin, a bureaucratic collectivism. They didn’t let a hundred flowers bloom as Mao did. They didn’t let what had been Lenin’s new economic policy of 1921 actually create any kind of competition there. China did.