Again, you are not making sense. Money circulated. Fine. Why does that matter?
Tokens are money. Cowry shells are money. IOUs are money. Labor-hour credits are money. They all serve the purpose of money. Some just do so more efficiently than others.
What does it matter that it circulated? It's still just keeping track of transactions. The only difference is that the transactions are not all a binary group. It is no different from those wage tokens you were talking about. It is simply a more efficient way to do the same thing.
You're retreating to an overly abstract level, here. Yes, money is "just a way of keeping track", but that doesn't say anything about how historically specific monetary systems operate. And my point is that the Soviet monetary system did not operate as a set of state-issued tokens as you are claiming, but was a necessary aspect of the entire production process. They retained it not for convenience, but because commercial exchange, however unfree, constituted the fundamental terms of the economy.
At what point do you translate from a market economy with some command elements to a command economy with some market elements? The USSR was far more the latter than the former.
How so? Because the major enterprises were state-owned? That doesn't mean they operated outside of the market. State enterprises dealt with each other and with consumers through a system of commercial exchange, that is, through the exchange of goods for money, or in certain situations through the exchange of credit-forms that stood in for money. The state was able to interfere with that to an exceptional degree, yes, and that too its toll on the economy, but those were still the fundamental terms of the economy; "central planning", the idea that the production process began in a Gosplan office and concluded at the point of consumption, was an ideologically-motivated fiction.
Same as above. The planning is what dominated. By focusing on the non-dominant part you are fundamentally distracting from what it really was.
Not at all. "Central planning", as I said previously, was a political fiction. That the Soviet state was sort-of-empowered to enforce its diktats with force doesn't mean that the economy actually worked that way, any more than it implies the same thing of, say, Russia in the Tsarist era.
The way I see it, large portions of the population have very strong tendencies to conservatism. However, conservatism concentrates wealth and power away from most of the population. Then the leaders get arrogant and over reach. Then you get a reaction. Eventually that reaction runs its course.
Do you have an historical example of this process?
Describing the relationship between the American states and the federal government as a contract would make more sense if the contract could ever be terminated. Which it never actually could be, not even under the Articles of Confederation, which are usually described as a system of government under which the states had sovereignty or sovereign rights, depending on your point of view.
I would tend to think that the manner in which the Constitution was ratified would obliterate any claim to state sovereignty. If you want to be pedantic, the 'people' of the United States - not the states themselves - possess sovereignty and delegate it in turns to the federal and state governments. That was the whole point of the preamble.
Fair enough. As I said, that was just how I understood it; I'm happy to admit that I'm wrong.
I'm not sure if that's really the case in Germany. The German constitution only overrides state constitutions, and every state has the theoretical liberty to leave or join the "area of validity" of the constitution. It's how the GDR joined, legally: states were refounded, then they decided to join the FRG, not the other way around.
And here too, I guess. I'm not doing very well today.
