The Communist Taboo

Why is 'communist' such a dirty word? 

 I was just walking through the main lobby down on the ground level and I overheard some guy talking very loudly to a woman several yards away.  All I heard was this:

 "That's not very capitalist, Mary.  Maybe you should move to a....communist country"

He said 'communist country' so softly that she could barely hear him.  It was like he thought twice about saying it, but figured he had to because he couldn't just leave the sentence fragment he had already said loudly.

 Communism is just another political ideal, right?  Why is it so taboo?

I worked with a Bulgarian guy at the gas station and we talked a lot about Bulgaria.  He told me that everyone there wanted communism back really badly, but it would never be as good as it was, even if they elected a communist leader.  He says that everybody got paid relatively the same wages, whether you were a doctor or a streetsweeper and there was little class-based conflict.  The real difference was in the quality of work you had to do.

Nobody had to find jobs either.  The government gave you jobs and it was illegal not to work.  Now, in Bulgaria, people are having tremendous difficulty finding jobs.  The poor resent the rich.  People are just unhappy and confused about what to do in life.