Quote:
Originally posted by Spanky
This may sound OK in theory but the facts don't support it. You are just spouting the communist line but that theory has been totally discredited. Anyone that works on development related issues knows that this propaganda just doesn't stand up to the facts. When a US corporation moves to a third world country and creates employment the liberals always scream that they are going to exploit the workers. What they don't realize is that these jobs pay more than what the workers were earning before. They also create a tax base. They may be paying the workers less than what we pay them here but they are starting from a much lower per capita income. YOu never see the workers saying - hey get this company out of here it is exploiting me. The workers may demand higher wages but they never say - get rid of this job.
Define subsistence level labour. That is a meaningless term. Can you cite me a case where US companies have opened up shop in a region and have actually reduced the standard of living? Costa Rica, which has been the most receptive to US businesses, has the highest standard of living in central america.
This is a joke right? How about studying what actually happened in these countrys. I would suggest you look at which countrys adopted which economic policies and how they turned out. Pick one country in latin america and trace its economic growth, GDP and the standard of living of the bottom fifth of the population and see what policies caused the different circumstances.
You accuse me of not arguing economics yet I have not heard one argument from you backed up by any facts.
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You actually sound like a McCarthy Republican. I'm not swallowing any "communist line," you're just talking out your ass. What I'm saying is that in Latin America, to take the easiest example, United Fruit came in and entered into contract farming or purchasing arrangements with large landowners. The US companies did nothing to foment the development of a skilled labor/merchant/educated management class. The counrty's economy continued to be run by the existing elite.
None of this did anything for the poor. The host country did not increase the level of public education, nor did they provide health services or build infrastructure in poor rural villages or city slums. The US did not contract with small farmers. They actually created an incentive for the plantation system to grow, squeezing out the land available to squatters or small farmers.
Thus, the only available employment for the poor was in the country, picking fruit for large landowners or in the city, acting as servants or waiters in the growing number of restaurants and nightclubs. Nobody had the opportunity to get an education, and to work their way up through the economic scale. There was no support for small merchants to develop. Ther was no growth of a service industry.
All of these factors led to an increasing concetration of wealth in the hands of a few, and a greater portion of the poor forced off land that had been available for small farms near the rural villages for decades, if not centuries.
Take Brazil as a classic example. There is an article Hunter Thompson wrote for Collier's, years before he became a gonzo journalist, which begins with the image of a wealthy resident of one of the cities, shooting golf balls off his balcony, to land in the slums below. That pne paragraph speaks volumes.
This situation is repeating itself in Brazil today, with thousands of acres of the Amazon rain forest being plowed under to be replaced by large ranches, mines, and natural gas fields. The large companies come in and basically run off the villagers in the area, or they simply destroy the ecosystem they have lived off of for generations, forcing more peasants into the cities. There are no jobs, there is not adequate education or health care.
There is a democracy in Brazil, but I wouldn't call the country democratic, and I certainly wouldn;t describe its economy as a free market. What you have is an oligarchy, and an economy that serves it.
You're on the right track. A thriving, free market economy with a strong middle class, supported by small to mid-sized merchants and manufacturers, peopled with entrepreneurs and middle managers is the key to a truly democratic society. But this middle class doesn't simply appear. Someone needs to provide the infrastructure and the financial, police, and political support for it to grow.
The lack of this middle class is a product of, and a support mechanism for the totalitarian regimes of all stripes that populate the developing world. If we really want to spread democracy, we'd be sending in the WHO and AID along with our military.
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