A Tale of Two Cities

After World War 2, stark contrasts could be drawn between East and West Berlin.

In West Berlin, a vibrant market-based economy had stimulated a material and economy recovery accompanied by respect for civil liberties. You’d almost not have thought the Germans lost the war, since there were no real consequences of actively or passively collaborating with the Nazi regime.

On the other side of the wall, East Berlin was drab and gray, wrapped in an omnipresent dictitorial system of secret police, directed from Moscow by Stalin and his successors. Much of the rubble of World War 2 still surrounded East Berliners.

It was hard to deny the contrast between these two worlds seperated by a wall, built to keep the captive communists in and the ideas and hopes of freedom out.

And, yet, the market-oriented economies of the West weren’t truly free markets. These economies were wrapped with and hampered by varying degrees of government regulatory intervention and redistributive welfare. The interventionist welfare states of Western Europe were more extensive and intrusive than what existed in the United States, but they were all managed, manipulated and partly planned societies within obstensibly democratic political regimes.