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How US helped Iraq build deadly arsenal
devil wrote in message ...
On Fri, 23 Jan 2004 00:44:03 -0800, Tchiowa wrote: Do you need to understand Bernoulli's Principle to know that flying is safe? Or which airline to choose? No, and anyway it's a gross oversimplification.\ I disagree. Planes will fly whether or not you know the scientific principle behind it. You can see for yourself by studying statistics and news that planes are safe. Same principle for Capitalism. You don't need to know who said what in 1582 about Capitalism. You can see for yourself in the real world that it works. But spelling his name right might help. :-) I did. :-) Lucky for me. Haven't spelled it since college and that was a looooong time ago. http://www.mste.uiuc.edu/davea/aviat...Principle.html Not surprising. In the meantime, try looking at what Socialism did to a billion Chinese and a quarter of a billion Russians and maybe you'll begin to understand. The maybe you can reply to yourself. Actually, in both cases, one might build a case to the effect that it served them quite well. This should be interesting. Particularly for China, the peasant leader Mao and his peasant rebellion (in the best Chinese tradition BTW) certainly helped rebuild a country that had been mired in a hopeless civil war, torn between small time warlords and their presonal interests. Make no mistake, without Mao, China would be much much worse today. Not htat this has much to do with socialism, except to the effect that they used the label. Actually if you compare where China is with where Taiwan is the primary difference is the economic system. No question that Taiwanese people live better than mainland Chinese, on the whole. You say China progressed under Mao and Socialism. Ending the wars and having relative peace certainly helped. But hundreds of millions of people ended up living in poverty. Ask yourself how much better they would be now if Mao hadn't imposed Socialism. To help answer that, look at the areas in China where limited Capitalism is now being permitted. People can own their own land and businesses and benefit directly from the profits. China is booming and poverty is being reduced. Poverty that was largely caused (or kept in place) by Socialism. Russia is more controversial. Still, before 1917, Russia was a mediaval backwater. No more than the rest of Europe, particularly Eastern Europe. And the fall of the soviet regime was precipitated by the cold war and the incapacity of the relatively poor country that Russia was (and always had been) to compete on military spending. So why was Russia so poor after nearly a century of a Socialist economy? Answer: nearly a century of a Socialist economy. Futhermore, it's not that now that Russia is no longer socialist it is now significantly better. But it is. Have you been there? I have. Also some of the other 'stans and former SSRs (like Kazakhstan, Latvia). Things have improved dramatically. Go to Moscow. The lines of babushkas wrapped around city blocks waiting to buy bread that most likely won't be there are mostly gone. (Now there are lines around the block trying to get in to the McDonald's.) Most problems are structural and cultural. Largely orthogonal to the ideology of the day. It will take time to change the mindset of people to understand that the promises of Capitalism and Free Enterprise work. The current older generation may already be lost. Millions of people whose lives were permanently damaged by Socialism. The younger generation doesn't have the same fatalistic mindset. They will succeed. Correct: *are succeeding*. |
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Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
How US helped Iraq build deadly arsenal | devil | Asia | 0 | December 31st, 2003 10:22 PM |