I listened with great pleasure to the debates between Kagarlitsky and Kapelyushnikov on SVTV.

Of course, Kapelyushnikov’s position was closer to me from the start, so I didn’t expect anything particularly interesting from him, but I was wrong: there were many witty phrases that could be broken down into quotes. It was known that Kagarlitsky is a strong polemicist; he proved himself to be a strong polemicist here as well. The most amusing thing to me was that his position largely echoes the position of Ekaterina Schulmann expressed in the program Status, when she was talking about Hayek:

Essentially, put your liberalism in the background; democracy is more important.

Of course, if one strictly follows the terms of the “two chairs” problem, both options are bad: both an authoritarian ruler who first liberalizes the economy but gradually turns to bronze and goes mad, and a democratic big state acting as a means for everyone to parasitize everyone else, and thus falling into a positive feedback loop.

In the debates, Kagarlitsky actively pushed for democracy instead of state planning; his interlocutor was not prepared for this, and as a result, there wasn’t much room for the critique of democracy in the debates. However, there was one good take regarding the fact that decentralized democratic planning would simply bind private initiative with others’ plans even more tightly than if it were centralized, and practicing pure economics without politics would prove simply impossible.

And yet, I didn’t quite understand: if both participants in the debate were not thrilled with the topic they were discussing and considered the subject of the discussion to be outdated by about seventy years—then what topic could they have argued about with more sense and pleasure, and what stopped them?