[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
pwrlifter198 wrote:
DoubleDuce wrote:
pwrlifter198 wrote:
Gregus wrote:
pwrlifter198 wrote:
@ Gregus Russia and Mao China had very strong central governments.
Security comes from the people not the government. The government only screws things up or fixes and regulates things it was involved in and now we have no choice.
Russia and Mao China both had very weak central governments before their respective revolutions. Strong central governments are a result of a cooperative relationship between the citizenry and elected officials. There is nothing wrong with government that transparency and accountability to an informed electorate cannot fix.
Yes before. It can be said to have been weak. Point being that “they” as in the time frame im referring to, had strong central governments. They did not have a willingly cooperative citizenry and when they did it was through fear or complacency.
You still have not named one present day country with a weak central government that you would want to start a company in, much less live in.
Winston Churchill:
Democracy is the worst form of government,except for all the others.
Name for me one democracy.
And still no countries.
That’s because there is a correlation between wealth and the centralization of power. Causation is what we are arguing. Does wealth lead to a leftist government, or does leftist government lead to wealth. I contend the former in the modern industrialized world.[/quote]
You are definitely right here, which is why “nation building” as Wolfowitz and Co. tried to do under GWB was doomed to failure. You cannot inject representative governments into economically failing states. Infrastructure and wealth creation must come first. Representative governments and allowance of rights will follow quite naturally. Then the toggling begins, or raising the floor. “Poverty,” a word I like to throw around a great deal, is subjective. In the US we have an arbitrary number of ~ $19K for a family of four. There is no basis for the number and no proof that a family of 4 making $21K has it in the bag. Poverty in LDN’s is defined much differently. The point is, as soon as a country is able to afford a safety net, it installs one for political purposes. This ties to my earlier point, current outcomes in the US and other industrialized nations were inevitable.
Where we still might disagree is whether wealth creation in the macro sense is best accomplished in a pure free market or in some regulated hybrid. My theory is that pure free markets normally lead to high concentrations of wealth, and therefore power, amongst a select few who can compete in that environment. This can create an aristocracy, or in todays terms corporatocracies. See Rupert Murdoch owning huge sections of media outlets, and yes information is power. Rules designed to keep the losers in the game alive to fight another day, in my opinion, actually make the winners stronger and therefore more competitive. If winners can kill or gobble up losers at the end of every contest then the winners become weaker by virtue of less or weaker competition. The also grow large, obtuse, and are no longer nimble. See current Wall Street scenario. If however, as a competitor in a equitably regulated free market, I have to worry about seeing the guy I beat again some day, I will not grow lax, fat and lazy, see Wells Fargo. Nature loves hybrids…I win.