In 1981, Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane traveled to the Soviet Union with his fellow co-founder, industrialist Charles Koch. Crane subsequently wrote a long-form essay about his visit that remains a must-read to this day.
The trip clarified for him what he felt before seeing the U.S.S.R. up close. Basically, the Left had missed the boat in flamboyant fashion given its belief that communism worked economically, and that the Soviet economy rivaled the U.S.’s in any kind of way. Just the same, however, the Right vastly overstated the Soviet military threat as evidenced by an arms and military buildup seemingly without endpoint. Crane’s view was that contra the Left, there was no Soviet economy to speak of. And contra the Right, precisely because the Soviet economy was a mirage, the country lacked the resources to pose any kind of warring threat.
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