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I had friends who went over to Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union, eager to set up businesses and get in at the start of a business friendly, capitalist climate.

Most of it ended up with people losing their shirts, as the Russian Mafia replaced the Communist Party. Or maybe it was the same thing. Certainly many of the same people.

I also knew a few people who went into China and tried to start businesses, back around that same time. Most of them lost their shirts, too.

Both countries essentially have kept their command economies, ruled from the top down. Not that Obama isn’t trying to do the same thing here.

Thanks, I understand better now what you meant. My confusion arose because you referred to Communist regimes. The post-Soviet Russia is neither Communist nor capitalist: it is truly ruled by the secret police(the FSB), which gives protection to mafiosi, who in shake out businesses. I know less about China, but it appears to me that it is simply a dictatorship by the formerly Communist elites. I cannot find a single feature of Marxism, whether in the Leninist, Trotskyist, or Maoist stream, in the present-day China. As in Russia, communism there has created and left us elites that ruled enterprises, cities, agriculture, etc. They are interconnected and have ca common language. Accordingly, they act as new “capitalists” but are nothing but bureaucrats who know how to get government approvals. All this is difficult to attribute to communism of any form.