Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
If you're arguing that free markets tend to outperform socialist or communist economies over time, I don't think anyone here -- with the possible exception of chickmagnet -- is going to disagree with you.
The interesting thing to me about one of the responses to you this morning was the suggestion that growth in Chile benefited some more than others -- there were winners, but also many losers (to say nothing of the tortured, etc.). If you're only going to assess the performance of an economy by the net output, you're going to miss a whole bunch of aspects of life that many people care about. In democracies, they get to vote.
Although those votes don't matter if we're going to support the violent overthrow of legitimate government to install juntas which will impose free markets.
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We supported right wing dictators in Taiwan, Chile, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia etc. The bottom fifth of the populaiton is better off in these countrys than almost the entire populations of surrounding countrys. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Burma are by far the poorest countrys in East Asia. South Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam war has almost not grown at all (its per capital income is $390 a year). The same is true of North Korea. Where South Korea, Japan and Germnay all had significant growth rates after they were wiped out by war. If Vietnam had a right wing dictator like South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, after the war, isn't it pretty safe to say that the Vietnamese people would be a lot better off ?
