By Nick Slepko

Ukraine is the new Taiwan. Recently, Yuschenko made good on his promise to abolish visa requirements for most Western nations—on my birthday no less. And yet, Russia has continued to increase the requirements for Westerners whether they come for business or a simple three-day holiday.

First, let us set aside that barriers to association such as visas (be they the typical external or the even more irritating internal propiskas from the Soviet-era) are immoral and should be abolished. Even if one is to support the idea of a visa regime (and they shouldn’t), keeping out citizens of countries richer than yours is a bad idea. These people are not going to take away jobs, overwhelm your social safety net, nor will they create slums on your municipal peripheries. Ignoring the Baltic States (because they’re just cheap knock offs of Scandinavia anyway), the Ukraine is the first of the former Soviet republics to recognize that barriers to foreigners are barriers to foreign investment. Moreover, by taking away the discretionary powers of the visa agents, they eliminate one more area of corruption in their bureaucracy. Plus, whereas tariffs on goods can be lucrative for the state (though still not recommended), visas are not and never have been. They have always been about power. Just ask the fascists as they were the ones who invented the modern visa system.

Russia is now in a position to import modern ideas from Ukraine—as it has been doing for centuries. Still, Putin is not as bad a guy as most Westerners want to believe. In fact, in America’s much shorter history, we have only had maybe four good presidents and over half of the remaining ones have been as corrupt as any Russian oligarch, but our institutions have kept them in check. Clearly, Putin is superior to the mis-named Liberal Democrats and is better organized to enact reforms than the horribly mismanaged and public relations-retarded Yabloko and SPS parties.