Book Cover; Title; Contents; List of illustrations; Copyright acknowledgments; Acknowledgments; Introduction; Why are there no Austrian Socialists? Ideology, science, and the Austrian school; Economic calculation: the Austrian contribution to political economy; Hayek's The Road to Serfdom revisited: government failure in the argument against Socialism; Coase, Communism, and the ~Black Box~ of Soviet-type economies; The Soviet experiment with pure Communism; The political economy of utopia: Communism in Soviet Russia, 1918 21; Soviet venality: a rent-seeking model of the Communist state.

Credibility, commitment, and Soviet economic reformPerestroika and public choice: the economics of autocratic succession in a rent-seeking society; The reform trap in economics and politics in the former Communist economies; Promises made and promises broken in the Russian transition; The Russian crisis: perils and prospects for post-Soviet transition; The political infrastructure of economic development; Why culture m.