81–90 of 149 posts
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Highly misleading. Australian superannuation savings are counted but American social security entitlements are not.
The USA has 401k which is the same as super in Australia. Social security is another thing altogether comparable to the dole but you have to first pay something in to ever get a pittance out. I'm not sure you should count it.
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People vote for the ANC in SA because there isn't an alternative party at the national level. Once you vote for the party, the party then decides who will lead. Even the article notes that the first 15 years of ANC rule saw significant development, as does HDI data [0]. The issue was that Jacob Zuma essentially destroyed RSA thanks to his corruption. And the only reason he became President was because he headed the A…
> People vote for the ANC in SA because there isn't an alternative party. I'd say that there is not a _viable_ alternative party, due to fragmentation. The DA has good representation in the Western Cape: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in...
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Not an actual quote, but rather a later-paraphrased summary of John Steinbeck, "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
Steinbeck was a hack. There aren’t enough calories in breastmilk to sustain life for an adult male. Also, equal opportunities for your whole population is a noble goal. Twisting that into, “Americans are delusional to think they could ever succeed”, just makes it seem like you hate America. You could twist socialism into, “You were afraid that not everyone could win so now nobody wins”, and be equally wrong.
It's just a question of how much, right? It's more than one woman can make, but I reckon it's less than one cow can.
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I was born in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and it took decades to get rid of its awful legacy. Socialism sucks. The idea of "means of production owned collectively" tends to suck even in capitalism (too many shareholders), but if the owner is the state, it sucks massively. Any alignment of interests goes out of the window, massive white elephant projects get built in the name of ideology, "superfluous concerns…
I was born in the People’s Republic of Poland, and I think most of the suckage you’ve described are due to oppressive authoritarianism of the former Eastern Bloc countries, and have little if anything to do with collective ownership of means of production.
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I was born in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and it took decades to get rid of its awful legacy. Socialism sucks. The idea of "means of production owned collectively" tends to suck even in capitalism (too many shareholders), but if the owner is the state, it sucks massively. Any alignment of interests goes out of the window, massive white elephant projects get built in the name of ideology, "superfluous concerns…
Socialism in Western Europe stopped to be about collective ownership of means of production very long before the fall of the wall. That was maybe the goal of sub 5% far left communist parties, not even mainstream ones. Nepotism, corruption and waste of resources are well established even in non left wing countries.
True, and the problem gets worse with concentration of power in just a few hands; the absolute extreme is reached if all the power is concentrated in one person, or two (Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu come to mind, or Stalin).
This process is mitigated by the chaos that is inherent in markets and democracies; but classical socialism is an intellectual construct that seeks to avoid most of the chaos and replace it by central planning and predictable development.
Decentralized socialism might avoid that particular trap, but I suspect that in decentralized socialism, people in many jurisdictions would just vote for return to the older form of private ownership and so it would end.
"There Are No Successful Black Nations" was the original title of this article in Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/09/why-black-people-must-h... It's an uncomfortable title, but it's a truth that must be confronted. How have once downtrodden countries like Korea, China, and large swaths of Eastern Europe been able to turn rags into riches while most of Africa has so far failed to? GDP is not everythi…
IMO the main problem is the arbitrary way borders were drawn in Africa by colonialists. Too many ethnicities that didn't get along very well suddenly shared a common state, while others were split between many countries. When even much richer and educated areas have problems with multiculturalism of much smaller scale (the Balkans, Spain, Belgium for example), it's not surprising that countries like DR Congo with ove…
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Sounds like a pretty good argument that South Africa's previous regime should not have given up power.
Is it? Are you suggesting apartheid should have continued?
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That is 100% wrong. Even in the very capital of corruption (in the US, anyway), Chicago, the slogan was "good government is good politics." In other words, doing a good job with the boring stuff is also good for getting elected.
"There Are No Successful Black Nations" was the original title of this article in Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/09/why-black-people-must-h... It's an uncomfortable title, but it's a truth that must be confronted. How have once downtrodden countries like Korea, China, and large swaths of Eastern Europe been able to turn rags into riches while most of Africa has so far failed to? GDP is not everythi…
IMO the main problem is the arbitrary way borders were drawn in Africa by colonialists. Too many ethnicities that didn't get along very well suddenly shared a common state, while others were split between many countries. When even much richer and educated areas have problems with multiculturalism of much smaller scale (the Balkans, Spain, Belgium for example), it's not surprising that countries like DR Congo with ove…
> Highly successful multicultural countries appear to be an exception, rather than a norm.
I personally speak four languages conversationally and from my familiarity, I cannot imagine even these similar cultures agreeing on enough basic values to form a stable society. How could dozens of cultures with different values and worldviews ever form a body of law that respects each tribe's values, customs, and interests?
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IMO the main problem is the arbitrary way borders were drawn in Africa by colonialists. Too many ethnicities that didn't get along very well suddenly shared a common state, while others were split between many countries. When even much richer and educated areas have problems with multiculturalism of much smaller scale (the Balkans, Spain, Belgium for example), it's not surprising that countries like DR Congo with ove…
I don't think the language thing covers it. Plenty of European countries have more than one language, only recently got 1 unified language. You have countries like India that manage to make a cohesive country out of disparate peoples. That's not to say these aren't contributing factors. My current 'theory' / observation is that sub Saharan Africa never really had large scale civilisations, I wonder if that colours th…
If these peoples have been living and fighting and reproducing successfully for millennia, why do Europeans and Americans think it necessary to get group them into states and force them to form large-scale heterogeneous bodies of law? Does that just make it easier to remove the mineral wealth from the continent?