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Comment by freshhawk | Hacker News Reader

I kinda laughed at the "Capitalism hasn't delivered" line. Yes it has, the companies are selling food with the lowest cost to produce that they can legally sell and using collusion and marketing to avoid a quality arms race with competitors. I think they were just confused about what was promised.

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> I think they were just confused about what was promised.

What, exactly, was promised to population when Romania (for example) switched to capitalism and opened its borders?

Not much. They got to execute Ceaușescu, film it, and show it as a video at Xmas for at least a few years. The whole capitalist part was a sort of added bonus.

Funny Ceaușescu was considered "too progressive" in Warsaw Pact and wasn't invited to all top-level meetings. I've read he even built a highway on top of mountains to have an escape road in case WP's armies invaded RO.

> Funny Ceaușescu was considered "too progressive" in Warsaw Pact and wasn't invited to all top-level meetings.

Don't have actual insight here, but 'progressive' to a soviet bloc communist would likely mean 'ultra communist' e.g. hard line stalinist..

Alright, then "dangerously regressive" would be a better term ;-)

He was kind of black sheep. In 1968, he refused to take part in the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

No doubt they were expecting meaningful economic growth. They got it.

Their economy has increased in size by roughly five fold since they switched to Capitalism, with zero population growth. They've gone from a GDP per capita of sub $2,000 to nearly $10,000 in that time. And it appears likely set to continue growing nicely in the coming decade. I'd be willing to bet that in another ~15 years they'll get to near $20,000 per capita, generally something closer to where Slovenia, Slovakia and Czech are today.

AFAIK the same living standards the most advanced 2nd world countries (SI, CZ, SK, DDR) had in 1989 they reached at around 2005, so it's like almost 20 years wasted on reaching the same quality of life, and that only on average. Before those societies were much more equal, e.g. income difference was around 5x from highest level to lowest level, nowadays it's 1000000x (fueled often by corruption and dysfunctional Rechtstaat), so on average majority of the population likely had their living standards decline (in terms of debt, mortgages that didn't exist before etc.). So just looking at GDP and nominal value might not tell the whole story as inflation was about the same. It's probably like laughing at Russia and how much do they spend on army, but ignoring the costs might be 10x lower than in the US. We in Western Europe tend to have pretty biased optics when ignoring local realities.

It's easy to pick on Capitalism, but I'd rather have cheap but low quality food on my table than no food at all[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_austerity_policy_in_Roma...

Laughed as well. Maybe Capitalism will fix it if they boycott inferior goods. I’m assuming they probably don’t have a choice.

One choice is to make use of the plentiful local produce markets.

The problem there is that the best produce gets exported. I've seen garlic from China in supermarkets for example.

Ah yes... the infamous garlic from China in my local supermarket.

https://www.google.ca/search?q=chinese+garlic

Personally, I avoid it.

The google link you provided returns a snopes article about garlic roots, a blog post from McGill saying theres no problems with using human feces as fertilizer, and a bunch of natural/health food sites claiming Chinese garlic is filled with toxic chemicals. Is there any reputable source that says Chinese garlic is bad?

Why do you need a reputable source for that? Why not just taste it? That enough of reason to avoid chinese garlic.

Had no clue this was "a thing". I didn't buy it because "I can't believe we're importing garlic bla bla bla...".

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