Maurice,
I suppose I spoke, in the middle of my argument with Gib, without thinking with regard to New Zealand resources. And I didn't know you had coal there. More too the place than sheep and Kiwi fruits, eh?
But, I would guess that those resources are both your curse and your blessing. Your local socialists many years ago cast their greedy eyes upon other peoples property, and made careful plans to steal this property, all for the "greater good", of course.
So your geniuses there many years ago created a sort of resourced based socialism and I can see how it would work, for a time anyway, with all those assets to exploit with regards to your small population.
But socialists desire to export their scheme everywhere, in fact they MUST, for socialism to survive.
Here is the rub: Take the Philippines, a similar sized country but with no important resources at all and over THIRTY TIMES the population of New Zealand. Take a similar sized chunk of Indonesia and the ratio would be about the same. In fact, almost the whole world is like that. So where do the resources come from for socialism outside of a few places like your country?
Take Cuba. They were supported for decades by the Soviets but now they are mostly kept afloat, to the extent they are afloat at all, by European "eco-tourism" with lefties from there and Canada thinking that they are "supporting the revolution". Cuba also has some help from foundations with a stake in keeping the international left alive, and from people like Soros.
But in the world there are HUNDREDS of little places like Cuba. Do you suppose if they all had a Marxist revolution that European lefties or even George Soros could keep them all afloat?
No, their only choice would be something like Pol Pot or maybe the local version of Mao's wonderful "agrarian socialism" and a quick trip back to the stone age.
Chavez, with his oil resources, can afford a degree of "oil socialism" in Venezuela but do you suppose Nicaragua could? Of course not, they have no resources and their only choice is a free internal economy or a quick descent into Pol Pot government.
Europe is "bleeding the hotel" and their socialist system is running on borrowed time. We have a more modest, but still dangerous degree of the affliction here.
These socialists had their "golden age" back during the heyday of the Soviet Union, when the big thinkers everywhere thought that the Soviet system, or something very much like it, would someday rule the world. They were wrong, of course, and now these remaining socialist systems are just relics of that era.
I do not would care about them at all, except for one thing, it is a central tenet of socialism that "socialism must succeed everywhere or it is doomed to fail everywhere". This, by itself, makes socialism and socialists anywhere very dangerous to the future of whole world.
Slagle |
