Home Business . One glimpse that hit home personally was an Associated Press photograph showing North Koreans riding their bicycles along dirt roads on the outskirts of the capital. The scene reminded me of South Korea shortly after my arrival there as a GI in early 1957. Today the Republic of Korea is a thriving country whose people enjoy one of Asia's highest standards of living. For the Koreans to the north, however, life is worse than anything ever envisioned by even Orwell.
Individual liberty is unknown, and the standard of living is one of the world's worst.
The Korean Peninsula, as it turns out, evolved as the 20th century's most telling real-life experimental laboratory to measure the effectiveness of capitalism vs. communism. The capitalist half is dynamic, the communist half is zombie. The communist half has dedicated itself to repressing and degrading the human spirit while ensuring the aggrandizement of the few who rule the soul-dead masses. This is what happens when government power trumps all other power, with no counterbalance of private economic power. A peek at how this arrangement works was provided by Jane Perlez of The New York Times .