LogFAQs > #914105492

Questionmarktarius posted...

Sunhawk posted...

At least, for the first decade or so, they allowed people to leave East Germany, if they wanted. Plenty of people went to West Germany, which was a civilised and independent country.

The part nobody wants to admit, is that the Berlin Wall was mutually beneficial.

Anyone productive was leaving the east, causing a severe brain-drain and undermining socialism.
People from the west would hop over and buy stuff from heavily-subsided stores, undermining capitalism.

Absolutely true, but it was doing quite the opposite for capitalism. For the people living in East Berlin, they'd see people with the spending power to come to where they live and be very well off in comparison. On top of that, subsidizing the cost of goods is something that market based economies regularly do, whether it be by tax breaks, tariffs, price controls, wars, etc, and tax rates were really high in the US coming out of WWII as well. With such a depressed economy in East Berlin and a lack of real GDP production, or rather a lack of revenue, from what was produced, the SD curves for them would dictate deflated costs.

And that's why the Soviets hated it so much. It was making their economy look bad, especially because of how dilapidated the infrastructure was when the Westerners would come over. That said, they needed that fucking money and that's why they would allow some access, but it also allowed them to kidnap some of our people as well.

Sativa_Rose posted...

Questionmarktarius posted...

The part nobody wants to admit, is that the Berlin Wall was mutually beneficial.

It wasn't actually mutually beneficial. There are specific individuals who benefited, but the two phenomena you described were overall harmful to both societies.

Would you mind expanding on this?
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