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To: taiwansemi
Ah, yes, democracy bad, communism good. Keep the masses happy and workign hard for the great leader! American democracy is too messy for taiwansemi, so he prefers the peace and stability provided by the GReat Leader. Perhaps we should invite Kim Il sung's grandson to be our benevolent leader.
108 posted on 12/21/2003 2:07:21 AM PST by Cronos (W2004!)
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To: Cronos
The thing that you continue to fail to realize is that democracy is a fine system of government for countries that already have a middle-class, but terrible for today's Third World countries that have majority-poor populations. Remember, it was the "bourgeoisie" that led the French Revolution and Americans annoyed about King George's taxes on their "bourgeois" international trading activities ("No taxes without representation!") that led the American Revolution.

But for Third World republics with majority-poor populations, democracy just gives the vote to a majority-poor population, who tend to vote left, that is, for a massive welfare state and anti-capitalist policies. This has been the story of India for over the past 50 years. Even in the U.S., the poor people tend to vote Democratic, so why would you expect different in Third World republics with majority-poor populations?

As we speak, poor people in Latin America have voted in socialist leaders like Chavez and Lula, and in Russia the population (which is 50% poor) supports Putin over the super-rich oligarchs. The Western media dislikes Putin, but he has a 75% approval rating in his own country.

I'll tell you again, it's really hard for democracy to take root in a country and flourish unless it has a majority or near-majority middle-class population. Just look at America's own difficulties in setting up democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's definitely not an overnight process as you imagine but takes decades at least, especially to build up a strong middle-class. East Asia's one-party governments all built up strong middle-class populations over many decades before they made the leap to full multi-party democracy. If you don't understand history, you will never be able to truly understand anything. You will just shout, "Democracy now! Democracy now!" like an unthinking robot. And again foreign investors avoid investing in today's Third World republics like the plague and prefer "communist" China instead for all the reasons I gave above.

112 posted on 12/25/2003 8:11:17 AM PST by taiwansemi
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