"Fairer"

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com In many ways, the health system, and many other arrangements in the former East Germany, were fairer than those in the former West Germany. Wages were more equal, for instance. And, except for members of the Communist Party, there were no rich people. None of the obscene spectacles, in the capitalist West, that people might glimpse from their rooftops -- the bright lights and vulgar display of the Kurfürstendamm. No, East Germany was the worker's paradise, even a place of leisure -- "we pretend to work and you pretend to pay us." And East Berlin so wonderfully grey. Indeed, it was such a paradise, that the Communist authorities had to erect the Berlin Wall, to keep the victims of capitalism from flooding into their country. That, at least, was the subtle argument they advanced when they began building it. And in those good old days, there were fellow travellers in the West, willing to play subtle variations on that theme.