Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

This is the sad truth of places like Cuba or North Korea. Everything is forbidden to the point that eating is difficult. So people get corrupted and the guards, etc. just want their part.

None of those things should be illegal. It is really annoying to see how a leader class kills people of hunger and make everything illegal so that now everyone is a criminal for trying to survive.

Communism is taxes and government regulation gone mad

Communism is the ownership of the means of production by the workers. You're talking about about an out-of-control regulatory state; maybe one with an authoritarian bent?

Your definition is the correct one for what Communism strives to be. A communal ownership of things.

It's unfortunate that such a sensible idea only becomes justification for kleptocratic oligarchies which is what the other poster was going on about.

It's not unfortunate, it's built in. "Communal ownership" requires that you can't freely buy and sell things. A government powerful enough to enforce that is necessarily totalitarian.

This is not true though. Communism isn't about communal ownership of all things, it's specifically about ownership of the means of production. Communism doesn't preclude ownership of personal property. You can still own your toothbrush under communist philosophy. However what you can't own is the steel plant. You can't own the roads. You can't own the Internet. You can't own the school system. You can't own the healthcare system. If it benefits society, society owns it.

You don't need an all-powerful totalitarian government to enforce that kind of ownership; the people can do it on their own. Owners of steel mills need workers to work the steel mills. Without workers, their steel mill is worthless. Without private ownership of a steel mill, the still mill is still valuable as long as it has workers. Under communist philosophy, the government doesn't need to use authoritarian powers to enforce communal ownership of steel mills, because no one wants to own a steel mill that has no steel workers. Therefore, workers have the ultimate power under this philosophy.

But all of that is allowed under our current capitalist system, so then you have to answer the question of why steel mills have owners. Why is it that to have a "workers collective" or whatever, seems to require heavy handed government intervention to prevent competition with privately owned businesses which seem to just spring up and thrive all on their own.