>I am not aware of any actual practicing communist economies that work well without outside subsidies.

Which makes me wonder why all the vultures so eagerly landed on the fresh corpse of the ex-Yugoslav countries, if socialism didn't create wealth to be robbed of? If all that economy was so bad, why did so many tricks have to be played to artificially diminish its value so to drive the enterprises into bankruptcy and buy them for pittance - why even bother, why not build new efficient ones from scratch?

And yeah, the external debt has quadrupled in the last 20-30 years and they still haven't managed to repaint everything that was built by that rotten system, not to mention build anything. Yup, we got two new bridges and 20km of highway, all financed by foreign loans. And we've gone from semi-developed industrial to barely developed post-industrial. This is not the capitalism you were looking for.