Input Junkie

I don't look at it that way. My take is that the endemic corruption was the solution to the economic calculation problem: you have an official bureaucratic command economy, but just as in the American armed forces, you have a subterranean layer of wheeling and dealing, bribery and barter and favor trading, that gets around the massive unworkability of the official system. Had the Soviet system actually been purged of corruption, I think it would have been far less than around half as efficient as the American system. But of course it wasn't in the interest of Soviet officials to get rid of corruption, any more than it's in the interest of Congress to get rid of lobbying and rent-seeking.