When I wrote about the crisis of unemployment in Europe, I received a great deal of feedback. Europeans agreed that this is the core problem while Americans argued that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government's official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might.
During the Five Year Plans Stalin created an almost pure command economy. If he needed food, he requisitioned it. If that didn't work, he had the country-side searched for private stocks which he confiscated, having first killed its owners. If he wanted to build a factory in the Urals, he sent people there to build it using food and materials he had requisitioned elsewhere. He killed maybe 15 million people he thought were opposing his policies. He also inspired workers very effectively, convincing them that they were building a new type of civilization, and were in fact becoming a new and better type of human being. He was helped in this endeavor by the fact that the entire rest of the world was manifestly against the Soviet experiment and wanted it to fail. The workers believed their lives depended on rapid industrialization, and given the rise of fascism, and their leaders murderous resolve, they were right.
