Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting a very nice lady who grew up in the Soviet Union (in Moscow). She was born in the Stalin years and left in the early 1980s.

I asked her questions about what it was like, and I learned something very interesting. She said that when she was a child, she remembers that bus drivers got paid better than anyone else. She explained that because education was free and determined only based upon one's drive and intelligence, it seemed that everyone in Russia wanted to be a doctor or a scientist. By contrast, no one wanted to drive the busses. There was no prestige in that, and it's boring to boot. So she recalls weekly signs calling for bus drivers, and each week the price they paid was higher.

First, I'd like to ask how it is that a communist system allowed such blatant capitalism. This is a clear example of supply and demand, isn't it?

Second, why is it that when applied in the US, capitalism leads to higher pay for doctors and scientists, but when applied in the USSR, it led to higher pay for bus drivers?

I can't answer your first question, but I think you answered your second question yourself.

If they had an abundance of doctors and scientists in the USSR then there was no demand for them. And remember, they got their education and training for free (and were probably supported financially while doing it) while students in a capitalist country must invest tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Doctors in this country start out with a huge personal debt unless they come from wealthy families.

I read an article in a magazine concerning the author's visit to Cuba in the past year. While there, he stopped to help someone beside the road with car problems and offered to take the guy home. Turns out the stranded motorist was a doctor and made so little money that he couldn't afford to fix his car. He was also almost out of food, too.

In my mind, the ideal would be somewhere between the two. I can remember a time in my life when doctors made a comfortable living, but would not be considered really wealthy by any means. While I am a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist and am repulsed by any attempt to redistribute wealth, there is just something that bothers me about someone getting rich off someone else's misfortune. I think I just need to get over it.

"First, I'd like to ask how it is that a communist system allowed such blatant capitalism."

Sarai, a few points to consider:

First, the former Soviet Union was not Communist, nor did it have a Communist system (despite what they and the west claimed). It was in political terms a deformed worker's state, because it maintained only the keystone of socialism (albeit mired in the crud of a Stalinist bureaucracy): The ownership of the means of production in the hands of the state.

Second, don't equate a disparity in salaries with capitalism. A capitalist is the owner of the means of production, i.e. the owner of a factory or of a line of buses. Did the bus driver make money off of the back of his workers? Of course not, the bus driver was a worker, albeit a highly paid one.

If we follow your argument (disparity of salaries = capitalism) to it's logical conclusion, the inverse would be true (parity in salaries = socialism). This of course is false, as I (an architect) make about the same salary as a carpenter, and the last time I checked, socialist revolution hadn't triuphed in the U.S.

In the former Soviet Union there existed favoritism (among many other ills), something which couldn't be further from Socialism. So good a*s-kissing party bureaucrats made tons of dough, while real Socialists were labeled reactionaries and if they were lucky, sent to labor camps. I know because a good comrade of mine was killed over ten years ago in Moscow fighting for real socialism. At that time, former party apparatchiks were stumbling like mad dogs over each other to steal what they could. Currently these thieves have become the mafia or the new-capitalists that rule Russia and other former Soviet Socialist Republics, presiding over the bleeding of the workers and retirees for their personal economic gain.