That is true. I don't think these systems could have sustained continued economic growth (and they didn't). I just like to point this out when someone argues that capitalism has produced the highest rates of growth.

Central America
 

What could be more important than a poker game?

Wolfie
 

Russia and India and China absolutely did not become poorer when they adopted socialist regimes. Quite the contrary. Having reached a certain level of development, they are probably better off with a market economy, but the social and economic divide between the rich (who really owned pretty much everything -- or, all the land in these rural, farm-based economies) and the vast, unending poor was so broad that they almost had to have some kind of redistribution in order to have an effective market economy.

The US had a very different experience, possibly because of the newness of the country -- when we were still a rural/farm-based country pretty much, the ownership of the land wasn't concentrated in the hands of a few. And when we industrialized, and the industries became concentrated in the hands of a few, they socialistically passed anti-trust laws.

Central America
 

Food and sex. Not in that order.

Central America
 

I think you just pinned down an important ideological distinction between the left and the right.

Wolfie
 

I am pretty sure you are wrong. After Independance India's economy went negative. And India's per capita income in 1985 was pretty much the same that it was in 1948. The government instituted a number of five year plans based on the soviet model that were absolute disasters. I do know that China per capita income dropped significantly from 1948 to 1985. It is estimated that Mao's Great Leap Forward reduced Chinese GNP by 75%. The Soviet Union's economy under Lenin was a disaster. The standard of living declined after the soviet takeover. Lenin was forced to institute the NEP (New Economic Policy) which allowed entrepenurship but kept the "commanding heights" of the economy in the hands of the government. The NEP brought the country back to a level almost to that it was under the Czar. However, it took Stalin to really increase the standard of living. Of course Stalin cancelled the NEP and exterminated all the Kulacks (wealthy peasant farmers) and petty bourgeous that were created by the NEP.

Central America
 

Instead of invading Iraq, we should have promoted free markets there? Weren't the people exploiting the oil-for-food program trying to do that?

Central America
 

Had we sent economic aid, economic aid would had spurred the growth of the middle class, and democracy would have ensued perforce.

Central America
 

This was a joke, right?

Distribution of Income
 

Yes it is true of you put Bill Gates into a McDonalds the average income of the people in the store would soar. But that has nothing to do with per capita income statistics. It is true in one product economies the top tier of society can get very rich why the poor get poorer. But in diversified economies when you have economic growth the entire society experiences an increase in prosperity. Many different organization (including the economist) have done studies were they have done the per capita incomes of the bottom twenty percent of various countries and compared those ratios to comparisons of the actual per capita income and the ratios are the same. In other words, the average person in Thailand is wealthier than the average person in Cambodia. The average income of a person in Thailand in the bottom twenty percent is higher than the average income of a person in Cambodias bottom twenty percent. This rule does not hold true for the top fifteen per capita income economies and for economies where they depend on one product.

Central America
 

Saddam Husseins government was even worse than Marcos's in the Phillipines. It was a complete Kleptocracy. When you have an economy like that no amount of aid is going to change anything. I should ad that the Baathists were Arab nationalists and socialists. So when the took over Syria and Iraq they instituted socialism.

Distribution of Income
 

whoops wrong post responded to in part.

How diversified were the "big three" socialist/communist states (Russia, China, India) before going red?

Central America
 

You have me there. I stand corrected.

Wolfie
 

The New Economic Policy followed the disruption that was the revolution and, oh, that little thing known as WWI. Pretty much all of Europe's economies were worse off after WWI than they were before it -- so the czar/no czar thing is not necessarily the issue you paint it to be. I know what kulaks are and all that crap -- you may have picked the wrong chick to argue Soviet-era economics with.

I'm not saying that USSR had the ideal system -- just that it's not necessarily the fault of a failure to stay with the market system. I mean, there weren't really any kulaks around under Nicholas . . . the NEP was good (on the whole), and is what developed under the new communist regime in connection with a redistribution of wealth.

Pity about the 20m + dead in WWII and 20m (or whatever) more dead in the purges by the totalitarian Stalin.

ETA strike "wrong chick to argue . . . with" and replace with "wrong chick to try to bowl over by using fancy terms that make it sound like you are incredibly knowledgable and she should just shut the fuck up." Because arguing this shit is pointless in the context, and if I'd wanted to argue it generally as a fun, interesting thing to do, I'd have gone a different way in my life.

Central America
 

Okay - but how to know in advance that the authoritarian regime will promote economic growth? Your answer was, "Authoritarian regimes that are not communist will generally promote economic growth, which will lead to democracy" and you point to some examples out of southeast Asia. You completely ignore the examples of authoritarian regimes that do not promote economic growth, such as those in Africa and the Middle East, and tried to transmogrify the southeast Asian governments' poor human rights records into examples of some sort of twisted form of democracy.

I agree with this, because communism was never going to result in individual economic prosperity. There is absolutely no link, however, between an authoritarian regime and free markets, and without that you don't get to a free government. If an authoritarian regime was oppressing the people, and showed no interest in their welfare, but only acted to enrich the few at the top, and the people of that country looked to a communist or socialist movement as an alternative, do you really think we acted to prop up that regime out of concern for the welfare of the people ? Interesting how we should overlook human rights abuses in Singapore because the people apparently choose order over individual rights, but when people in El Salvador choose individual rights over order to obtain relief from human rights abuses we should intervene because the people are choosing the wrong path.

This is my last post on this topic. I got work to do.