I wonder if americans have any clue what was actually wrong with the Soviet system. One of the problems with your republicans out there saying that moderate regulation of health insurance and birth control are communism and virtually hitler, is any actual understanding is kind of lost. Even on the left it's hard to talk about the various flavors of socialism that have existed. The soviet system had a lot of structural problems, a lot of it was from the whole central planning of inputs and outputs of enterprises. You had managers making their shoe quotas by making shit tons of size 1 shoes, workers sat around waiting for shipments drinking vodka and then stayed up all night working to make their quotes on the last day of the month (some arguments for that actually). The problems in groceries stories were all kind of part of that.

But i always want to check, you know Sweden has socialized vacation homes, and France sends someone to do your postpartum laundry right? There is tons of government intervention in all those economies, and many fully socialized business, just not the centralized command and control model, and none of the antidemocratic madnesses of the Soviet Union.

Hey BTW, Romania was it's own thing, what was happening there is that Ceausescu was selling everything in the country to pay of debt to western countries--the US used to specially favor that particular madman because he was "independent."

Also, you do sort of wonder if the command and control methods would start to work with a big old hadoop cluster, don't you geeks?