FX’s The Americans Shows Socialism in Action: Barren Shelves in Soviet Moscow

Brent Baker | March 28, 2017
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The Americans, which will have a new episode tonight on FX, last Tuesday delivered something you rarely get anywhere on television: A “teaching moment” which highlights the failure of policies liberals advance. Namely, the failure of socialistic/central control economic policies as the episode panned by near-barren shelves in a Soviet-era Moscow grocery story.

In the scene in the March 21 episode, “The Midges,” a character who used to work as a KGB operative in Washington, DC. and is now with The OBKhSS (Department Against Misappropriation of Socialist Property), visits a grocery store to scold the manager over how she finagled to obtain an excess number of tangerines.

“Most grocery stores don’t have fruits and vegetables like this,” he ominously observes. “Not so good. Not so many choices.”

>> This video clipped to illustrate a post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog <<

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