quote for the day

For years, I've been reading David Brin's praise of Russ Daggatt, but never bothered to look him up. Now I feel foolish, because I should have. First article I've read, Daggatt demolishes the idea that St. Ronnie single-handedly defeated those terrible Commies

"A more sophisticated theory of how Reagan ended the Cold War goes like this: Reagan’s big military build up caused the Soviets to overspend in an attempt to keep up which bankrupted the Soviet economy. This explanation has the benefit of a plausible theory of causation. But let’s break it down. We spent a huge amount of money on the military during the ‘80’s (a true statement). The Soviets tried to keep up with our escalating military spending (an untrue statement). The Soviet economy collapsed (a true statement). Can you spot the problem? The Soviets didn’t attempt to match our military build up. We greatly increased our military spending during the ‘80’s (tripling the national debt in the process), but the Soviets didn’t."

That's just for starters. Following that are a host of other reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union including fax machines and our new playground, Afghanistan. I'm going to have to put him in my blogroll.

(all this is moot if you followed last Wednsday's link)