<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Sebatianos @ Oct 15 2007, 08:53 AM) [snapback]316194[/snapback]</div>
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But you miss the point of what FREE MARKET acctually is!
FREE MARKET is a market where the people who come in with the MONEY are FREE to TAKE everything they want.[/b]
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Only if the owners wish to sell. Free market is about mutually agreed deals, and that's the only possible objective definition of mutually profitting deal. It may seem unfair (subjective judgement) to you when the two contractual parts have very different wealth, but at least don't twist the meaning of a mutually agreed deal into a robbery. Poor people wouldn't get very far without dealing with rich people on necessarily unequal terms, even if only to get a job, to get loans for their small endeavours, etc. Of course poor people will prefer fresh cash from the state, but going down that road is building a system that will eventually colapse.
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And about COMMUNISM in Ethiopia - don't make me laugh. There was only a handfull of countries that even got close to being communist - and not a single one was.[/b]
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Most people even say that Stalin wasn't a real Communist, it's the same to me what words you use, and I never asserted that Ethiopia is or was Communist, I only quoted facts about its economy and it's been you who discussed whether that qualifies as Communism or not; the Wikipedia qualifies it as Socialism. Just the same I could argue that only a handful of countries got even close to being fully capitalist, and not a single one was; and I would be totally right.
In the case of Ethiopia, the core problem is that only the state can own land. So nobody will get rich out of it and so no private entrepreneur will be able to finance industrial enterprises. That would only be possible if somebody had an enormous amount of land leased from the state, and small landholders can't achieve it even taking risks because they can't use any land as collateral for loans because they don't own any. Of course in a totally Socialist economy it's up to the state to create the industry, and for that the Ethiopian system relies on taxing exhausted peasants whose government has leased them just enough land so that all have the same amount, hardly enough to survive when there's no drought, in a country where droughts happen every other year. Not to mention the issue of efficiency in public monopolistic management and corruption in single-party governments. Of course foreign aid will come when the system has worked its magic and living conditions are desperate, just enough aid to alleviate the conditions and fallaciously misproving that the system can work with a little help.
It's actually fairly straight forward, two plus two equals four. You can take yourself as far from the ground facts as you wish until Socialist economy starts to make sense. The same happened in Zimbabwe, it was fairly socialist but free trade wasn't so strangled that agriculture couldn't work while Mugabe had fun with his World Socialism and Non-Aligned games. But one day he decided to carry out a land reform, and all hell broke loose. Zimbabwe was the first African crops exporter and now millions would starve without foreign aid.
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I'm not starting an endless discussion about the terms of the discussion so that the real discussion never actually starts. I was talking about state control, call it Socialism (like the dictionary), call it Xism if you wish. I've been before in discussions both about the terms and about the concepts, look in Abandonia Reloaded's archive for them. I don't want to repeat what I have already repeated, and I guess Tulac would have posted further if he wasn't so tired as me. So look in AR if you want to know further what I think, but I'm dropping this NOW.
