ABSTRACT
The collapse of communism signalled the glorious victory for the West in the Cold War. Just because the collapse of communism occurred after the Reagan build-up, it does not necessarily follow that the build-up caused the collapse. The Soviet system was structurally weak since its founding and doomed to collapse. Unfortunately, past choices made under Cold War illusions have structurally distorted the United States economy and weakened its long term viability. If the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union tells something about the structural failings of the political economy of socialism, then the collapse of state capitalism in the United States should tell something about the structural shortcomings of the political economy of leviathan and "imperial overstretch." The statistics justified large military expenditures to fight the advent of global communism. If the Soviet economy was structurally weak, then the threat of communism would have been rather shallow and would not have justified the military strategy of the Cold War.
