I do not follow the events in the Czech Republic for a good reason. The majority of my views about Czech history and Czech present times—both on economics and the related politics—are something most Czechs do not agree with. One former coworker, never a communist, who used  to work at the American embassy in Prague wrote to me that I write nonsense.

I am not one of those Czechs who, by the accident of communism, are languishing in the faraway country of the U.S., thinking all the time of the country of my birth to which they would return someday. But I believe the following may be instructive to Americans who had the good fortune not to be born in an authoritarian and terrorist socialist and communist country.

The fact of the matter is that I would not be able to live in the Czech Republic today because I would spend the rest of my life saying "but in America....."

I left for America, as did several of my relatives and those of my wife, Olga, because I could not live there. 

This feeling was naturally exacerbated by communism, but there was much more than that—which I understood fully only after living here.

For instance, I am an agnostic who has read several versions and editions of the Bible, the most published and sold book in the world, with some 10 billion copies. Only 3% of Czechs profess to belong to any organized religion, as the Czech Republic is the most atheistic country in the world, thanks to its history over the last 200 (that is two hundred) years. More on that in my book.

I am always amazed how wise were those old rabbis who wrote those texts in the old Aramaic and Hebrew that are found in the Old Testament. The allegories are uncanny.

For instance, when Moses returned from the mountain in Sinai with the tablets containing the Ten Commandments, he found that the Jews in the meantime had built a golden calf and started worshipping it.

And the God became angry and decreed that all the leaders of the Jews were to be slain, including Moses's brother. In addition, the Jews were ordered to wander through the desert for 40 years—two generations—until all those who participated in this travesty would die out before the Jews could settle in one place.

It took the Germans 50 years to cope with the horrors of Nazism. That was after the Allies performed to a great extent the denazification of the German society.

It may take the Czechs more than 50 years to overcome the vestiges of communism in their minds, in their national economy and in their national government.

And this is the reason why 36 years after the "demise" of communism (there is a good reason for the quotation marks), the standard of living in the well educated and industrious Czech Republic remains at 65% of our standard of living, which bothers me immensely:

• The Czechs habitually vote former communists into the presidency (two of them already and Babiš, mentioned below, could be the third one).

• In addition, there were three presidents who were certified drunks—one under communism, but two were presidents after the year 1989, the year of communism’s demise.

• President Václav Havel said, "We all are at fault because we all participated in communism." His policy "We are not like them," which prevented a decommunization of the Czech society, is believed by some to be his payback to the communists for helping him to the presidency in 1989—the communists did not see a left-wing writer as a big opponent of communism. In that, the communists did not err.

• The communists were sitting in the parliament continually since the founding of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, created from the radical left-wing of Social Democracy in 1922, through the socialism of the First Republic (dubbed "democracy" in Czech mythology) until 2015. Even today, Olga was invited as one of the last living relatives of the painter Vojtěch Preissig by the town board in his birthplace. Upon arriving, we were greeted by the Deputy Mayor, who is a communist. Given the history of Olga's family, this was an affront indeed.

• Economists are painfully aware that the Czech economy does not produce products with a high added value (selling a compressor instead of a complete refrigerator—or, there is a difference between Skoda and Mercedes).

• The history and the status of the famed Czech manufacturers of motorcycles and cars, such as JAWA, (which had a substantial portion of the US market in the early 1950s), and Tatra, which all stopped production, is an illustration. The Tatra car manufacturer of Hans Ledwinka and Ferry Porsche fame stopped making cars entirely and is producing merely 1,000 trucks a year (Ford makes millions of them) under the directorship of some American managers in cooperation with DAF. This is a vestige of the times when anybody coming from America was believed to be an expert manager.

• And exactly a year ago, there was a nationwide discussion in the Czech Republic whether the government should raise salaries across the board by 7% or 10%. There was not a peep about the inappropriateness of the government raising salaries across the board, just like in the inflation-ridden South America. When I broached the issue in a major Czech daily, I was called names.

Babiš is not only a former communist, but also a confirmed voluntary confidant of the communist secret police StB, in which capacity he was denouncing Czechs to the police. When I raised the issue with a relative in Prague, an engineer, I was told, "See, he was fighting corruption even then." (StB were those thugs who, 72 years ago, physically and sexually abused a 17-year old Olga in a solitary confinement, only to be sentenced to years of hard prison labor based on trumped up charges of subversion and treason. For the communists governed by terror. When we defected to the United States in 1975, 22 years after Olga's arrest, she was still not allowed to vote as a dangerous "anti-social element.")

Babiš is one of the richest individuals in the post-communist Czech Republic who became rich in the botched "privatization" of the Czech industry. His explanation: "The faults were in the laws in effect at the time and not with me."

Babiš holds himself as a victim of communism, which is a common tack taken by most of those (perhaps 80% of the population) who derived benefits from collaborating with the regime and propped it up with their acquiescence. 

The artists will serve as a good example: When my classmate Jiří Muller and Olga's classmate Václav Havel were in and out of jail, not for anything they did but for what they said, the "Golden Nightingale" Karel Gott thanked the communist party for "the beautiful environment it created" (the speech is available on YouTube), and signed together with 3,000 other artists, including the beloved actor Jan Werich, the Anti-Charter 77, aimed at the Charter 77 of Václav Havel.

And because life takes inexplicable turns, when Karel Gott died a few years ago, the grateful Czechs covered his villa at Prague-Bertramka with flowers. Just like the larger-than-life statue of President Beneš at the Prague Castle in front of the Foreign Ministry, which was placed there…

"because President Beneš merits it." 

President Beneš was the one who transferred power to the communists in a constitutional manner in the Victorious February 1948, after the good Czech voters voted 40% communist, thereby making the communists the largest and the most powerful political party in the land. This event is now described in the Czech mythology as a "Communist Putsch," so the good Czech voters could absolve themselves from their complicity in this travesty.

While Babiš claims that he was persecuted by the communists, according to his own admission, he was spending summers in North Africa with his parents or in the south of France. That was at the time when we were hermetically sealed in a communist country and were allowed to travel only as far as East Podunk.

Babiš, whose party won the elections a few days ago, will likely become the prime minister for the second time and is also expected to become the next president of the Czech Republic.

Babiš is no Trump. For Trump has not been a communist or a snitch for the communist secret police. And Trump is not a fascist, as our extreme left likes to call him. Little do they know that in order to be a fascist, Trump would have to be a socialist as the national socialists and contractual allies of Soviet Bolsheviks according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, as Messrs. Hitler and Mussolini tell us in their writings.

Neither did Trump enrich himself in some nefarious enterprise, such as the botched privatization by the state. Trump borrowed $1 million from his father (his grandpa was a penniless German immigrant), which he built over the decades into a business empire worth several billion dollars. For that, our extreme left accused Trump of overvaluing his holdings. He was even convicted by a NYC jury on 32 counts. But as the value of such properties is in the eyes of the beholder, the judge refused to sentence Trump.

So the center-right government of the prime minister Petr Fiala did not do enough to improve the national economy? That only shows the lack of understanding among his critics and including Fiala himself, where the problems are.

Fiala would have to solve the problems I am listing above, and he did not do it.

 “Czechia First?" The new term “Czechia” was championed by the former president Zeman, also a former communist, a Russophile and a drunkard (he used to stumble, being inebriated at official functions, and stated openly that he liked alcohol). We cannot imagine an American president like that. Trump does not touch alcohol. 

Sen. Tower was not confirmed in the past by Congress as a Secretary of Defense after he was accused when somebody saw him drunk.

“Czechia” is awful. It reminds us of the brand Czechia of a pre-war Czech motorcycle, and of the derogatory German Tschechei. It also reminds us of another Czech awful neologism, "pohoda" (comfort), which is now used widely in all forms, including as an adjective or a verb, and not only as a noun.

I am not expecting any dramatic changes in the Czech Republic as a result of the last election for reasons stated above.

To my question, "Why did you vote for former communists as presidents?" my friends and relatives reply that they did not vote for them. But 70% of the Czechs did!

Similarly, most Czechs have no idea what the name of their representative in the Czech Parliament is. I rest my case.

Von Mises is an occasional opinion column on economics, written by Ivan Orisek of Forestburgh, NY. It’ll look at money and the way money works in America, and show  you the numbers behind the headlines.