North Korea: Currency Chaos = New Misery in Asia's Communist Cesspool

Just when you thought things couldn't get much worse in the basket-case nation known as North Korea, they did. Take a look:

A recent move by North Korean officials to rejigger the nation's economic system has introduced a new level of misery to everyday life.

In the last month, the price of rice rose tenfold at private markets, and residents often had to wait in line for hours in subzero temperatures to buy food.

. . . At the heart of the turmoil is a series of dictates imposed late last year by Kim Jong Il's regime: revaluing the currency, closing down privately run markets in favor of state-owned shops and banning the use of foreign currency and the sale of many imports from China.

Recent visitors to North Korea, aid agencies and defectors say the changes have sent the already-troubled economy into a tailspin.

. . . The new dictates appear designed not only to put the entrepreneurs out of business but to confiscate any accumulated wealth.

"We need to strengthen the principle and order of socialist economic management," Cho Song Hyun, an official with North Korea's central bank, said in December to a pro-regime newspaper in Japan.

The result has been chaos and panic. Here's some awesomely direct analysis from the news story. Pay attention, kids:

"Was it incompetence or callousness that led them to do this? You take your pick," he [Marcus Noland, a North Korea specialist and deputy director of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics] said. "There is so little accountability in the system, the regime has considerable capacity to inflict misery on the population without any significant political risk."

And that is why that entire form of government is rotten and has always produced mass human misery.

RELATED POSTS: Pushback Against Kim's Money Grab. Also, NK is the world's worst nation in terms of economic freedom.