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A Diigo list for all the awesome stuff I come across on Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com/)
Updated on Jun 01, 12
Created on Jun 13, 11
Category: Computers & Internet
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Krishna Aradhi's List: Hacker News
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May 27, 11
> One can debate the practical merits of planned economies all day long but this does not change the fact that privatization is theft.
No, it's not. Theft is theft. Privatization is privatization.
There's been some pretty poorly implemented privatizations in history, but also some decent ones. I'm in Mongolia now, and they did an okay job of it -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Stock_Exchange
Still imperfect, but much better than the clusterfuck that was communism.
Seriously, everyone remotely educated in an ex-communist country hates communism. I've been to most of them - Cambodians, Chinese, Mongolians, Ukrainians, Czechs... it's only people who live in the outstandingly, legendarily prosperous West that wax poetic about the horrors of that era.
Seriously, I've seen a lot of it firsthand. I've also been to still-somewhat-communist places like Vietnam, and they operate a hell of a lot worse than their neighbors.
Anyways. Generally speaking, trying to repair a massive, systematically flawed system is hard. It's like how the tax breaks on mortgage interest screw up American housing prices, making it so high earners have more of an incentive to buy housing, thus locking younger people, lower earning people, and senior citizens out of housing, or making them pay inflated prices.
It's screwed up. It's a bad system. But unwinding it now would cause a cascading set of problems in the housing market. Thankfully, that poor system of incentives is limited to one sector of the American economy, whereas communism pretty much systematically destroys innovation, free thought, invention, and any semblance of sanity and order.
Seriously, go compare equivalent communist and non-communist countries. West Germany and East Germany, Taiwan and PRC, Cambodia/Vietnam and Thailand/Malaysia/Singapore (not perfect comprables, but close-ish). Hong Kong and PRC.
Oh yeah, and North Korea and South Korea.
Communism sucks. Unwinding a broken system is hard to do, but thank god they're trying to move past communism.
Edit: Lots of upvote
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