It is scary how far we've moved towards totalitarianism. We imprison more people than the Soviets ever did, although the CCP still outdoes Amerika in executions.

Change is so slow and so gradually progressive that day by day people endure it. Gradualism is a deliberate process. It's the famous case of frog-warming.

"...keep a portion of what we earn." -- And the portion we are allowed to keep gets smaller and smaller, once the principle is established that we have no say, no right, in what we keep. So, where *does* the money go?

A co-worker of mine left Romania near the end of the cold war. He just sits amazed at how stupid we are. Same story for our realtor, left Romania about the same time...

I have read the book, and seen the movies several times (netflix is a beautiful thing). I am always shocked when the government makes a new rule in the movie, and we look to our friends and they say, "Didn't Obama do that last week?" (the latest example was an IRS rule to prevent businesses from dropping health care coverage and giving employees the cash.)

In my years in the hair salon I met a lot of people that went back to the old country to visit. Germany, Italy, England, France, most all of western Europe. I did notice they didn't stay. They came back to America for freedom and opportunity, and my great haircuts!. I fear America is different today. Me and my family are well, but I hear terrible stories of people leaving the US for a better life. Belize, Australia, Singapore, the Phillipines; there seem to be all sorts of places around the world with more opportunity, more freedom, and less taxes.

At the same time our Government is like the dumb guy talking to the wood stove, telling the stove if you make a little heat I will give you some wood. The big government guys refuse to consider that too much taxing and too many permits to file can kill the goose that lays the golden egg. We live in a world economy today. Electronically, money (capital) flow around the world at the speed of light. In the 19th century capital moved at the speed of a sailing vessel. In the 20th century, capital moved at the speed of Airmail. The point is, today's CEO is going to do business where he can find resources, labor, and logistics in a constellation that make sense for his/her stockholders. If we continue to raise the tax and regulation barriers, we deserve the results we get. Capital follows ROI, and careers follow capital. I know that's hard for a left leaning Progressive to understand, but yes Barry it really is that simple.

It's not even a question of labor today since most manufacturing is done with robots, just watch the show "How it's Made". So logistics, resources, and tax treatment become really important for the CEO's decision.

Add to that the invasion of privacy and the ruling by fiat from the White house and we have an America that is vastly different from history. You could say it has fundamentally changed.

Funny, natural born Americans don't seem to see it. The change is slow and progressive. Talk to or read a book by a Cuban on the subject and you get perspective. The same is true of eastern Europeans. I always wondered why immigrants often achieved more than our natural borns. I have come to the conclusion in is/was our personal freedom to work for ourselves and keep a portion of what we earn.

I encountered those same bathroom attendants in Holland when I visited there as a child. Couldn't figure out what the hell he wanted when he approached me as I walked in and directed me to a stall. I was like 8 years old at the time. I went out and told my Dutch hosts and they gave me a coin to give him. In retrospect, he was directing me to a stall so I wouldn't miss the urinal and pee on the floor! It is a job for the old and or lame to give them an income. That is in a society that values work over dependency. This would certainly be the case in a place like E Germany where dependents aren't needed to get elected, they just cost the apparatus money. I grantee though that in a police state like East Germany, they were in fact integrated in to the security apparatus.

She sees it quite clearly. We need their stories to get out.

Something in the story of your customer brings tears to my eyes. How have we allowed this country to go so far already?

Been going on for a while.
When the KGB records came out, McCarthy was not just shown to be correct in his fears, it turned out he was VASTLY UNDERestimating the degree of infiltration and takeover in Hollywood and in our government.

When he fell, due to his contemptible methods, the Communist and Socialists and their fellows remained in place to continue, and still are, using my party as their face to America and hoping to collapse our economy so they can replace it with Socialism.

It was strange. There was no privacy there then. I guess there is none anywhere now.

He could have written that. At that age, I had never seen a bathroom attendant before. I've only seen one a few times since.

Not funny at all. How many lives were destroyed as a result of that kind of spying.

I told her about the movies but I really hope she reads the book. I told her it was intimidating for me too but once I started it was an easy read. The passion she spoke with was moving.

There was some categorization of it. As a novelty, in Germany you can go somewhere(?) and see if you were in the East German databases. My friend gave his name and address(west german) and sure enough they had an audio tape of him. It was a phone call to his grandparents(east german). He played his grandmother a song on the violin for her birthday. He felt this was hysterically funny. I didn't laugh

I hope when she asked if you had read the book you looked confused and intrigued and gasped, "What?! There's a book???!" Just kidding. :)
I'm sure she could relate 100% to AS, I'm surprised she hasn't picked it up yet. I really wish people would consider listening to people who have LIVED through communism. How are so many born with rose colored corneas anyway??

That sounds strange. I guess he would hear a lot of private conversations.

What could he have possible been jotting down? "American chap just took a tinkle....and is a bad tipper."

People that lived thru that are trying to warn us. You make a great point about the IT today. The NSA is showing us what is possible.

In the one day I spent in East Berlin in 1984, there was a bathroom attendant who expected to be tipped, for cleaning the bathroom I suppose. What was really odd about him was that he had a notebook and pen. Perhaps he was one of the informants that CircuitGuy referred to?

In the 90s I knew a history buff who told me the DDR had a shocking volume of info on its citizens. Over half the population acted as informants in some form or another. Half the population was spying on the other half. The thing was there was no way to sort through all that information. If technology had existed to search through a massive database quickly and easily, the gov't would have been much more powerful.

I wonder if he foresaw that we were years away from an IT revolution and a huge leap in the ease of searching through large amts of data.