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Re: Governments sharing the wealth with rural communities ... the crux of the problemComrade amstock82, I am in agreement with you all the way until the last paragraph where you wrote: "When the government runs things, the top few richest people control more wealth than the bottom 50% of humanity." Nonsense I say. All freemarket capitalist systems are run and maintained by government. Governments always run things in modern nation states. Special interests may hi-jack public agendas (however defined) but governments always run things. The degree of public intervention into market and social spaces will vary from one country to the next but the systems are all structurally similar. The Nordic economies tend to intervene more than Anglo-economies; their socio-economic outcomes are excellent, top-notch, some consistently better than the USA. All nation states experience a certain amount of looking after your own in the political realm. Thankfully in the rich OECD club we managed to tame the worst of the cronyism, patronage and other forms of corruption. Latin America has a long, tragic history of cronyism stacked on kleptocratic capitalism with warm hints of feudalism far too often shaped by ethnic and racial considerations. If you step back and look at the broad history, one can view highly dysfunctional Neo-Marxist populism as not much different from what has prevailed for the last few hundred years. The marketing is different, the constituency is different -- the working poor finally 'matter' even if the policies were ultimately damaging and self-destructive -- but the acquisition of wealth by those close to the Chavista leadership is not much different from what has transpired throughout most of Latin for a very long time guided by a diverse set of different ideologies. Chile went from a successful freemarket democracy to a dysfunctional, grossly incompetent Marxist nightmare to a brutal military dictatorship to full fledged liberal democracy that is now recognized as a developed country. I have not paid close attention but my impression is that the Chilean welfare state has grown and now provides more services and more support on a per capita basis than before. Which of course is precisely why you want a thriving freemarket as well as a thriving private sector. All that to say, that maybe there IS hope for Venezuela though I have no idea how Venezuela gets out of the current mess. Now that you have me on this topic, if I had a choice between inflicting a Pinochet-style dictatorship or a Chavez-Maduro style authoritarian regime on a people, I would probably go for Pinochet because although people did suffer, it was quickly over and outcomes for ordinary people started to improve. |
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Msg # | Subject | Author | Recs | Date Posted |
8310 | Re: Governments sharing the wealth with rural communities ... the crux of the problem | Public_Heel | 0 | 10/17/2017 7:35:33 AM |