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Communism Fails Once Again

The communist regime of North Korea, following in the foot steps of China, was forced to abandon it’s planned, centralized, government controlled economy in favor of a free market in order to keep it’s citizens from starving to death.  The economic policies of communism/socialism/Marxism have shown themselves once again to be unsustainable.  The Washington Post has the story,

Bowing to reality, the North Korean government has lifted all restrictions on private markets — a last-resort option for a leadership desperate to prevent its people from starving.  In recent weeks, according to North Korea observers and defector groups with sources in the country, Kim Jong Il’s government admitted its inability to solve the current food shortage and encouraged its people to rely on private markets for the purchase of goods. (emphasis mine)

In essence, the communist government of North Korea has realized it is unable to ration food and control the economy in a sustainable way and has given up trying.  Food has always been in short supply in North Korea.  Because of this, a large black market developed over the years that provided much of the Communist citizenry with food.  However, many of the merchants involved in the black market food trade began to acquire some degree (by North Korean standards) of wealth.  This was understandably an outrage to any self respecting communist/socialist/Marxist regime.  It’s just downright evil for someone to make a buck by selling food to hungry comrades, right?

In order to stick it to the ‘greedy’ black market capitalist who were feeding the nation, last November the North Korean government changed the value and denominations of it’s currency, and set a low limit on the amount of old money that could be turned in for new money.  This essentially destroyed any amount of wealth the black marketeers had accumulated.  North Koreans were only allowed to trade in a maximum of 150,000 WON for the new currency.  This equated to about $60 US dollars.  Any amount of money an individual held over this amount became worthless.

This dealt a severe blow to the black market.  Just as if the story had been ripped from the pages of Atlas Shrugged, food shortages started to worsen because people were forced to rely on the government for rations.  By trying to destroy the black market food merchants, the government took away the means of the population to feed itself.  Thankfully for the people in North Korea, the government has finaly realized that only a free market can effectively feed a nation and has now removed many of the government controls and restrictions on the market.

A planned, controlled and centralized economy has failed once more.  How many times do we have to see this before we realize that socialism, communism, and Marxism do not work?  How many people have to starve to death around the world from lack of government rations before we in the United States of America stop flirting with socialism and return to our free market roots?  Government control of an economy does not work, but the invisible hand of the free market does.  Oppressing and denying the people of their individual rights leads to disaster, but freedom and liberty leads to prosperity.  Why do so many supposedly smart people not realize this?  Do they refuse to see what communism, socialism, and Marxism eventually lead too?  Oh, I forgot, they claim that is just hasn’t been tried by the right people and in the right way yet….

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1. Obama is Cutting the Deficit by Spending More
2. Obama’s Method of Job Creation
3. Obama Considers a Spending Freeze

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