[vkou]

> Still, you need money to control the army and keep it interested.

Making payroll is never an issue for a sovereign that controls a central bank that controls their own currency. You're completely missing the point, because you're thinking in terms of money. A country isn't a business, or a household, it doesn't budget in the way you think.

> Money is the force of reason, ignoring it comes at one's own peril regardless of the force one controls:

Money is a floating-value paper proxy for material wealth. When there's a shortage of material prosperity - when people aren't building stuff, that's when you get a problem. Your position has just as many ideological blinders on as the one you think you are making arguments against.

The USSR collapsed because it failed to provide material prosperity. China, by any metric you could measure, is wildly succeeding at providing that material prosperity. That is what the party is focused on, because that's what's going to keep them in power.

[ethbr1]

For counterexamples of the primacy of money, see also: North Korea, Iran, Russia, Pakistan.

You have to have bases of power, who are compensated and secured.

It's less stable, but doable with the right mix of alternatives, to ignore "the people" as one of those bases of power.

[anovikov]

Idk how you can include any of those but North Korea in the list (North Korea only exists because China secures it). Russia at least, is a good example of the opposite: give people chance to earn and invest money and enrich themselves and they will give no shit about even the most ridiculous things government does.

Soviet Union has collapsed while having whole lot more economic power and raw output of just about every industry, and was much more up to date technologically, but it deprived people of their basic instinct: to save and invest money and grow rich. Today's Russia allows and encourages that. Moreover, it even allows people say, to blatantly ignore taxes on all levels (i know people who make millions bucks per year in Russia and they don't know what tax number is, receiving and spending money through the banks in the open - and banks even help then when they need to make that money look legit abroad). As long as you don't try to oppose the great Pu or mess with politics overall, the regime has nothing against people enriching themselves - so the support base is rock solid and need for violence to maintain internal order is next to nonexistent.

Russia isn't democratic, but it is capitalist in the sense: you can own capital and government wants you to, and sees people who have capital as by default more well-behaved and loyal than those who don't. The sickest shit Putin may say on TV is shrugged by those people as "Pu just wants to make those peasants happy", and they may be even right.

[vkou]

> Soviet Union has collapsed while having whole lot more economic power and raw output of just about every industry, and was much more up to date technologically, but it deprived people of their basic instinct: to save and invest money and grow rich.

The Soviet Union pissed half of its economy away into its military, and the other half into its particular brand of waste, inefficiency, and corruption. It had a shortage of housing, basic consumer goods, and appliances - a shortage of material wealth, which became untenable by the time the fourth post-war decade rolled around, and everyone started wondering why the country has 12,000 nuclear warheads, but is still so goddamn poor.

If material wealth weren't the problem, or if Gorbachev didn't decide to stop imprisoning people for complaining about it, it would still be around today.

The world's three meals away from anarchy, if there were serious material shortages in the US today, nobody would give a crap about what monetary policy it follows, or whether or not you can save. King Bread is a ruler you swear fealty to, compared to him, King Dollar is something that comfortable philosophers build elaborate arguments for and temples to.

[ethbr1]

Or as someone wryly observed: most French revolutions started when Paris ran out of bread.

[ethbr1]

Those are all countries in which I'd hazard a free and open election, without a thumb on the scales and voted in by all citizens, would topple their governments.

Your description of Russia seems accurate, ~1995 to ~2010.

However, policies appear to be changing into tighter, more direct state control of oligarchs, in an effort to ensure civil stability.

Additionally, Putin is now 70... which is getting to the age that more laissez faire dictators turn increasingly autocratic in response to any external disturbances of their social control.

At some age and tiredness, it seems like the blunt approach trumps finessing a solution between multiple competing interests.

And... not to put too fine a point on it, but Putin did just survive a coup attempt, which wouldn't have launched if there weren't some support for it among the myriad power brokers in Russia.

[anovikov]

I don't mean oligarchs. I mean everyday men and women. People don't want to be politically active because they know that Putin allows and wants them to acquire wealth (and even has no problem with them exporting that wealth abroad); and they also know that the masses don't want them to be allowed that, and if Putin is out, most probably masses will have it their way.

[ethbr1]

Everyday men and women, which I take to mean middle class, aren't a threat or power base in modern Russia.

They don't have voting power.

They don't have demonstration power.

They don't have access to broadcast their free speech via mass media.

Short of outright rioting, there's little they can do that matters to the Russian government.

Which means than in a trade-off between {what the people want} and {what those with power want}, the people are going to be ignored.

> (and even has no problem with them exporting that wealth abroad)

"...discuss reintroducing some capital controls to help prop up the struggling rouble."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/16/putin-meeti...

[anovikov]

Ironically, today the idea of reintroducing capital controls was rejected, officially, "because it was obvious that people will quickly find ways around it anyway". Simply put, there is no need to further increase already terrible level of corruption by introducing another useless but corruption-inducing regulation.