> 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 upvotes and lots of downvotes. To the people downvoting, look - Hacker News is, what, 80%+ Western Europe, USA, and Australia?

If you're sitting at your computer in San Francisco, you've never been further out of the States than Cancun, and you've gotten your worldview from some professor of Postcolonial Studies that also has never gotten outside of San Francisco, then I don't know what to tell you. Seriously, stop and reflect for a moment. Communism actually fails in real life. And I don't mean fails the way AT&T's customer service fails. I know it's not a realistic short term suggestion, but if you get the opportunity, check out Cambodia, the Killing Fields, and Security Center 21. Check out Saigon, and note that much of the infrastructure hasn't been replaced since the Fall of Saigon in 1975 (the fire hydrants are still almost all American-made - when they've occasionally failed, they're just removed and not replaced). Compare West Berlin and East Berlin for a stark contrast.

Seriously. I don't know what to tell you. Communism is really, really bad. If you're in the West and have never left the West, you don't understand and can't understand. Go through a few of these countries critically, yes on paper, but also in the real world and see how bad things were, and how much better they are in sane places with private property and rule of law. I'm not writing this for my health - if you currently are sympathetic to forced-collectivism, I'd really encourage you to look at how it's turned out historically. If you're sympathetic to communism, I'd like you to stop that, because I think it's destructive the same way that believing in religious violence is destructive.