By refering to "this economy", I was assuming we were talking about capitalism.

And I agree that the Soviet Union was a poor manager of their natural resources. However, there are issues of scale at play here, and rather different geographical considerations in this comparison. The area in question has pretty much everything mineralogic.

Had the Soviet Union been a capitalistic society, not only would it probably have kicked our ass, GDP wise, because of those resources, it would probably still have the resources to keep chugging along, long past our resource depletion and shift to a net raw material importing country. As it stands now, the quasi-capitalistic system that emerged from the fall of the USSR has at its disposal this untapped wealth. If we suppose that shipping through the Arctic Ocean becomes easier in the coming decades, we might also assume that great wealth and power will shift to that country. If they do it right, they will be very important players in the future. These will not be American companies, they will be Russian.

Your constant comparison between the abuses of corporations and governments is an interesting historical exercise. As I have considered it over the years, I think you may be overlooking a couple of salient concepts.

The abuses of corporations tend to be more diffuse over the historical record; acting not as the army wielding government but as the quiet enslaver and usurper. How many humans suffered from the actions of the East India Trading Company? (Not the best example given its close relationship with a navy toting government. How many had their inaliable rights violated by the slave trade? Was the theft of Cherokee Land driven by the government, or by the pressure of the captalist system desiring the wealth of the land? Same goes for the gold in the Black Hills, and many other places. Is it possible to calculate all the desperate lives of coal miners and their families during the so called Guilded Age? Do their trials and tribulations, trapped in the world of the company script and the Pinkerton goon, count as much as the hard labor in the cold iron mines of the Urals? Both were, in many ways, denied "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

Another aspect is that it is only recently (the past 300-400 years) that we have seen the power of the corporation emerge. Governments are much older. As corporations become as powerful as governments, I cannot help but think that there will be corporate abuses that rival the worst governmental atrocities. Already we see the pilliaging of tax money by corporations that are too big to fail. And I thought that a central part of capitalism was that a corporation that was not run correctly would fail, and the system would self correct. Was this the result of too much governement or corporations out of control? I can envision a world that is run by a handful of massive corporations and it makes me shudder as much as the thought of complete government control.

Lest we forget, the Fed is not the government. It is a corporation, basically, that is supposed to be overseen by the Congress. So when the TeaParty cries for the end of the Fed, they are advocating the end of a legal company.