At the same time, we liberalised, deregulated and desubsidised the economy radically and quickly. This liberalising tendency lasted, to our great regret, for only part of the last 25 years. Partly because of the slowing of our own reform momentum (for domestic political reasons), but mostly because of our applying to and finally entering the EU, we started a reverse process. That is why our economy is more regulated and subsidised (and harmonised and standardised) now than 10-15 years ago. The final blow came with the recent financial and economic crisis, and with the methods of its "treatment" by means of very extensive government intervention.

Our economy is now more regulated and subsidised than we imagined at the time of the collapse of the fall of Communism. We did not believe it could ever happen. It seemed to us that the masterminding of the economy from above was so discredited by the Communist experience that it could never return. We were wrong.

We also assumed that everyone understood that government failure is inevitably much bigger than any imaginable market failure, that the visible hand of the state is always much more dangerous than the invisible hand, and that vertical relations in society must be less productive (and less democratic) than horizontal relations. Again, we were wrong.

Twenty-five years ago, I warned against creating a negative expectations-reality gap because it would have undermined our reform process. I have to accept that I myself feel such a huge expectation-reality gap now. I expected to live in a much more free and democratic society and economy than is the case today.

It was caused partly by the victory of social democracy in our country and partly by the importing of the European economic system, with its overregulation, high taxation and redistribution, welfare state, and fascination with all kinds of anti-market measures, connected nowadays mostly with environmentalism, with its anti-democratic social ideology which successfully hides its real substance while pretending to care about nature, the environment and our Blue Planet. We may be oversensitive in this respect because of our long Communist experience but we see many similar phenomena, tendencies, ambitions   and arguments around us today.

To allow this to happen means that we have learned nothing from history, and especially from the Communist era. It means that celebrating the end of Communism is inappropriate. It is creeping back in different forms, under different flags and slogans, without sufficient resistance from us.