From the Mercury News.

North Korea's deep ambivalence about business could be seen on a recent Saturday in this mountain resort district, opening day of the Magnolia Blossom. Security police paced outside the freshly painted restaurant, hands clasped behind their backs, glaring at customers inside. The maitre d', on loan from South Korea, was not authorized to tell North Korean workers to sweep up shards of a broken water bottle.



Then the North Korean manager started to argue with an assistant over how much to charge for lunch -- $9 or $100.

An American diner, halfway through his bowl of spicy noodles, suggested calculating a price based on profits.

"Our purpose is not to make a profit," Kim Chol, the 45-year-old manager, said patiently. "It is for the everlasting honor of our beloved leader, Kim Jong Il, that we are interested in serving proper meals to South Korean tourists, even to foreign tourists."

Asked the prices of ingredients for the meals, Kim Chol said he did not know. He orders the food he needs. t comes.



*Sigh*

Every so often, a Marxist or other totalitarian state will try to paste free market ideas on the concrete face of their totalitarianism in hopes that somehow the magic will rub off. Sort of a "cargo cult" thing. Look...we're allowing a few private farms. Look...we have a dozen private businesses. See? We have a stock market. We have skyscrapers and roads. Next year...cars.

The idea that you can make a market work by deregulating tiny chunks of it is wrong, and usually makes things worse. Cripes, look what happened in California when they deregulated only part of the energy industry, or to the banks when they deregulated only part of the banking system.

North Korea's rulers have no more idea of how a market works than a Galapagos tortoise has of supersonic flight. But heck, I can't explain it to a lot of folks who grew up in the United States, either.