[hakfoo]

I wonder if part of the disconnect is that we're comparing the wrong countries. Even at their peak, the USSR was a much poorer country than the US or Germany.

Many of the differences we blame on a command economy may be either caused by, or exaggerated by, the wealth gap. The US could afford to make both bombs and toilet paper, but the USSR couldn't. It would be interesting to compare Soviet quality-of-life and achievements to a free-market country of similar per-capita GDP.

The "clone the West" decision process at least did build some knowledge, infrastructure and manufacturing base. In contrast, there are plenty of wealthy Western countries with no meaningful semiconductor or electronics industry, because they could just buy American/Japanese/Korean gear.

[brokenkebab]

We can start from the fact that unlike USSR's, US gov't didn't bother itself with production of toilet paper. But by some magic it was available in the States, almost as if some invisible hand...

Claiming that bad economy stats can vindicate failures of a particular economic system is putting the argument upside down.

USSR as a state wasn't poor anyway: it possessed huge deposits of mineral resources, vast cheap, and controlled workforce which wasn't allowed to strike, or even negotiate - so gov't could offset the need to increase QoL for workers for almost indefinite time. It apparently was quite enough to successfully wage a number of proxy wars around the world against mightiest of enemies, support dozens of allied regimes with money, material, and resources.