[IronJack]

Does anyone know WHY N. Korea is starving? I mean, is it the usual communist bureaucratic corruption and inefficiency? Is it nationalization of private property and the accompanying death of individual incentive? Is Kim Sung-Il confiscating grain and foodstuffs and hoarding them as weapons of control? Is it just natural occurrences like drought and flood?

I've heard a lot of talk about hunger and privation in that country, and it's always laid at the doorstep of the president. But nobody ever explains why it should be.

[maro]

1. Communism always screws up the economy.
2. Kim Jong Il thinks he is the world's expert on everything (no one around him dares disagree); he concocted an agricultural policy with really quite specific instructions to the farmers (though I doubt he has even gardened); everyone followed instructions to the letter; famine followed.
3. There have been some natural disasters, such as droughts.
4. What food there is, is reserved for the army.

The story told is just the tip of the iceberg. Desperate families have sold their daughters into prostitution. People subsist on tree bark and boiled grass. The human suffering is beyond measure. Think of Auschwitz made into a country. That is the true face of communism.