<First, it's economic system. Not political. Second, things like a job, health care and housing are regarded as civil rights under some communist systems. What they had may not have been much, but it was available to citizens. Not so in many capitalist countries.

No one comparing standards of living in nations like Japan, the U.S., Hong Kong, England, or other (mostly) capitalist countries with the standards of living in ANY communist nation, now or in the past, can possibly take seriously the idea that somehow the communist system was better for its people.

I would be the first to agree that not all rotten, poverty stricken societies are communist. Not by a long shot. But so far, all communist societies have been rotten and poverty stricken.

Sometimes a leftist will point out the improvement in life some people have had in some nations under communism, but this is always comparing it with a previous system that was basically subsistence agriculture or worse.

We've been over the "economic-political" bit before. No communist economic system can be anything other than totalitarian at any scale larger than a farm commune. This level of top-layer control is essential for the massive centralization of even a remotely modern economic system. No one has yet pointed out a communist economic system that was not totally bound to a totalitarian dictatorship, and until somebody does, I see no point in drawing a meaningless division between these two ideas.

On the other hand, I will certainly concede a point you made earlier that there are and have been capitalist systems that were ruled by governments that could only be called authoritarian, or dictatorships. All cats are mammals, but not all mammals are cats. I do not, of course, approve of this political and economic setup, although it's better than a totalitarian system, which is not saying much.

I find it hard to conceive of a dictator that can somehow keep his fingers out of the economic machinery, but apparently some have been able to restrain themselves, staying out of that sphere, and restricting themselves to the traditional looting of private wealth that has been the hobby of dictators for eons. His power is usually only wielded when his political control is somehow threatened.

Obviously, this is not a stable situation, since in my opinion people who are prospering under a free economy will not tolerate for too long the restrictions on political power that oppress them in many other ways. The dung will probably hit the fan when the first union is formed.*

My theory has always been that the "King Log vs. King Stork" dictator type is a function of basic personality types: a common thug or crook sees ruling a nation as a way to get palaces, women, prestige, good food, and the other great perks of a dictator. He's only too happy to let corporations and private industry generate the goodies for him. Think of any of a myriad of medal-bedecked leaders in Africa, South America, or the Middle East. Stalin might fall into this category as well, as might Attilla the Hun, or generations of European lords, dukes, princes, or other tyrants.

When you get the idealist or philosophical dictator, like Mao, Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot, or certain Caesars, you get real trouble. They believe they can remake reality in the image of their minds, and we can see how well that works. This way inevitably lies the killing fields. This is why ascetic leftists like Ralph Nader scare me a lot more than fat, rich leftists like Ted Kennedy. Watch out for any potential leader that has written a manifesto of some kind.

There are few bigger fans of Ayn Rand than myself, but had she ever received the constant calls to run for political office with anything other than her usual horrified revulsion, I would have had serious alarm bells go off.

The excesses of some societies have been grievous. Terrible. Don't seem to affect the average schmuck, though. And when they talk about how Afro-Americans have been treated here, how Native Americans were treated, how Japanese-Americans were treated, we don't sound all that super ourselves. Many societies in their formative years don't seem to have been kind.

I don't know which "average schmucks" you have been talking too. Granted, with luck, a lot of perseverance, and a whole lot of laying low, a person can survive under a communist system. However, Pol Pot killed a third of the average schmucks in his nation. Stalin starved to death millions of average schmucks in the Ukraine. The gulags were full of average schmucks, as were the Nazi death camps. The Yiddish term "schmuck" gets a little creepy here.

And show me another nation that has treated its minorities in the past any better than we treated ours. It's not like African-Americans were wealthy businessmen in Europe during the years of slavery. We outgrew it, and so did most other civilized nations.

*Why labor movements in small nations overthrow dictators only to often cheerfully replace them with a communist system is beyond me. Why don't democratic capitalism and libertarianism ever attract these people as an alternative to President-For-Life General Franco Francisco Blowhard? We need a better public relations firm.