Susan Lee

It seems a large government will plant the seed for collapse and a dictator who, in turn squanders the capital during tenure. It is a mad race to the bottom for those societies.

The Haitian government, like all socialist systems, does not honor contracts. Who in his right mind would bring in enough capital if the government would immediately renig on the contract.

The story’s told of a foreign guy opening a car battery plant in the post-USSR Russia. He got it up and running, only to have the Russian government come in and “nationalize” it because it was deemed critical to military production.

How many times will that happen before capital simply flees?

Check out Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela for a current version of such theft.

His story involved missionaries giving gasoline powered rototillers to villagers in Africa so they could farm more efficiently.

The story goes that the missionaries came back a year later only to find the rototillers in a shed, unused. The reason given was the same: the neighbors in the next village would become envious and attack them if they used the tillers.

In socialism everyone is equal…equally poor and destitute.

Compare this to an economic system where advancement is lauded and something to be emulated, not destroyed.

Here, the squeaky wheel gets the oil. There, the nail that stands proud is hammered down flush with all the others.

Now, to be sure, there are plenty of Americans who are firmly convinced that we would all be better off if we grew our own food, bought only locally, kept firms small, eschewed modern conveniences like home appliances, went back to using only natural products, expropriated wealthy savers, harassed the capitalistic class until it felt itself unwelcome and vanished. This paradise has a name, and it is Haiti.

No. Apart from “expropriated wealthy savers, harassed the capitalistic class until it felt itself unwelcome and vanished”, that’s precisely what Haiti used to be – until the government, in support of U.S. interests, destroyed the capital base by such things as wiping out the avenues of capital accumulation (like the local “Creole pig”) and stopped the agricultural sector from supplying local food in favour of cash crops for export that gave the kleptocracy more to tap into. And things really were better when it was like that.

The third world does provide an eye opener. Corruption is so much less camouflaged with sophistry, for example, to set up a business in Angola, requires an Angolan as a 51% “share holder” – in the name of socialism of course.

If the business is anything interesting, then that “shareholder” will need to be either a general or one of the President’s family, who will say; “Give me… and I want a car, and expenses account and a salary of…”

a piece about patents
Jeffery,
you will probably find this piece from the guys who do Opera web browser interesting. Apparently an “Update Button” is patented, US patent 7222078 ! One more stupid mercantilist block on innovation.
http://my.opera.com/portalnews/blog/2011/05/13/software-patent-insanity-strikes-down-small-time-developers

Excellent joke! Very true too. I am a philosopher of sorts and I have found that a really good joke points out the ugly truth in anything it touches. You summed up the whole blog in one paragraph!

Americans and Europeans are used to seeing public land as a positive, like parks. This is mainly because we had a lengthy period of time where public lands were effectively abolished, particularly in America where we didn’t have a long entrenched royal class that made the whole country public land. With such a giant buildup of private land to allow for capital to form and be used, we haven’t felt the negative effects of the government gobbling up the remaining land and labeling it public because we didn’t have any use for it at the time. This is why we have places like Yellowstone or Central Park and any attempts by the Haitian government, even if we transplanted our entire government apparatus there to manage it, would immediately fail.

The reason we have a Central Park here and that Haiti would cut down all the trees and eat all the animals in the zoo is because capitalism is, surprising to most people, environmentally friendly. The entire concept of capitalism is doing more with less. The more you produce, the fewer resources used, the less garbage created and thrown away (I see CO2 going up the stack as lost money, I paid for the materials that are making CO2 and I have better things to do than throw away money, and would love to find a way to capture it and use it for something productive, plenty of businessmen agree with me), the higher the profits go. If all 310 million of us were expected to subsist on the same level of Haiti, we’d take up tremendous amounts more land, deforest large stretches of our wilderness (fun fact, capitalism in the form of tree farming saved the California Redwood), and pollute to such a degree that the native in those old commercials would die of dehydration from all the crying. Haiti is a far more disgusting place than America despite their lack of all the water heaters and dishwashers that are supposedly destroying the environment.

Government property is the worst of both worlds. It’s land that is removed from the private sector that can be used for something productive and is effectively blocked from even the most meager of public land usage. In a country like Haiti, maintainance of government property would require a sufficient capital base to avoid completely driving the populace into steep poverty, which is a contributing factor to the problems in Haiti. As noted in the main article, the Haitian regime (no matter how benevolent and well intending the leaders may be) still needs funding to operate. Remember, government doesn’t do anything of value and requires confiscation to operate. The excess production in Haiti is so poor that government effectively has to take anything above and beyond basic subsistence to exist, which creates the problem noted by Jeffrey as anything that can be expected to be used for capital formation is removed to fund government operations. Even “proper”, “good”, or as socialists like to pretent, “competent” government would run into this problem. Haiti is in such a poor shape that the presence of any government at all ensures the nation will forever be poor. The Haitian people don’t produce enough above and beyond their own survival to be burdened with a large, unproductive expense like government. The only reason the US can even have a government that doesn’t immediately drive the population into poverty is because we effectively didn’t have one for 150 years, one that had any dealings with most of the people and one that, for the most part, never confiscated capital accumulation (ie no income tax) for operation. This allowed us the necessary capital growth to produce in such immense quantities we can hand over 50% of our real production to government (combined local, state, and federal spending is over 50% of our economy) and still have so much left over we can afford luxuries.

Not that government is a good thing even with the resource base to support it, I’d rather not hand over half my annual salary (either directly or through sales taxes) to an entity whose only purpose is to justify someone else not contributing (welfare) or spending that to hire people to tell me what I can’t do with the 50% that’s left (regulation).

The former is cool. The latter is a contradiction in terms and can be terribly repressive to poor people trying to scratch by.