Many market economists have long asserted that eventually the people of the Eastern nations would give up on communist command economics. Interests must eventually trump an ideology that runs counter to interests. Market economists and rabid anti-Communists agreed that the ideology was counter to interests. But the economists had better (more generally applicable) grounds for understanding citizens of communist states than did the American far right because their conclusions were grounded in expectations of rationality, not expectations of irrationality.

XREF: Connects to rational choice theory and interest-based explanations of political change versus ideological/pathological explanations.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 533