In 1975, after nearly a decade of outright conflict, the United States government abandoned its doomed escapade in Vietnam. It left a devastated country and over a million corpses in its wake. The corrupt South Vietnamese regime, already teetering on utter collapse, completely dissolved without American support. And the Communist forces of North Vietnam eagerly descended on Saigon, impatient to implement their antimarket and antiproperty policies.
What followed was a French-style reign of terror ostensibly waged on behalf of Marxist egalitarianism. The authoritarian ideologues who had been imposing draconian economic and political programs on Hanoi wasted no time in confiscating property, punishing southern landholders, and transforming South Vietnam into a

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