Kudos Wayne on your latest comments! The voice of reason does live on this blog. So many want to assume and jump to conclusion without hard evidence. Thanks Wayne.

The whole thing with Russia economy is pretty complicated to say the least. I'm not sure if there were any serious analysts out there that thought the transition to capitalism would happen in anything less then 50 years because things were so screwed up. The truth is that in some of the former soviet block countries the fall of communism was used as a way for foriegn investors to basically by huge chunks of industries real cheap.

I met a guy once from the former czeck repbulic. At least I think that's where he was from. Might have been from a different soviet block country. What they did was give each citizen a few thousand play dollars. Basically monopoly money. They could use this to bid on a certain number of stocks for a particular company that was being privatized. So for example, let's say you want to get stock in a car factory. You make a bid using say 400 of your 1000 play dollars and that would get you a certain amount of stock. This sounds like an awsome idea that is fool proof. Well, sure enough, someone figured out how to take advantage of the situation. The people living in these countries are in really bad shape right now and willing to do anything for a few extra bucks. Investing in a factory for the most part wouldn't pay off for most of them for quite some time. So what happened is foriegn investors with a bunch of money came in and told people, look, if you get stock in company xyz I'll buy it from you for this price. So instead of the government owning the factory an outside interest owns it. Doesn't seem to benefit the people too much in either situation.

Government ownership of a particular commodity isn't that unusual in any country, capitalist or communist (Actually, I think in most of the major oil producing countries the government controls the oil). The problem with communism is that it's completely fascist with the government owning everything and controling everything. But there are many capitalist societies where the government owns a particular commodity because it actually works out better of the general public in that situation. A great example of this is water. For most municipallities sewage and water distribution is run for city and municipal governments. Not really sure why this is but it tends to work out for the most part.

Just putting my two cents in.