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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (62428)	12/20/2002 11:26:49 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Good article From Hoover on the Third World Economic Problem. It correctly identifies the problem, IMO, but has no answer for it. The Poverty Trap I'm afraid I wasn't taken with it. Several problems. The notion that the "State" steals from the private sector is far too much reification for my tastes. I suspect, if one looks fairly closely at any given country that is their focus, you will find that the state is not sufficiently strong to ward off private interests. So that when folk talk of the "state" taking from private interests, it's more likely some private actors (business or individuals, tribes or families) with enough political clout to take from other private actors who lack enough resources to ward them off (out of favor business sectors, the poor, other tribes, etc.) They use the "state" as their instrument. Incidentally, we move ever closer to that model in this country with the campaign finance situation being what it is. However, the differences are still differences that make a difference and suggest that what these writers need to do is consider that the "state" is not always the "state." In some settings, the state actually nets out to do what we think of a state doing, providing security, building and maintaining highways, monitoring the economy, etc. In others, the sector called the state is either too small to act like one or too much dominated by extra-state actors. This argument further suggests that these particular authors are too much caught up in free market ideology to pay attention to the details of settings which sometimes override the ideology. Finally, the argument that "limited government is necessary for economic development," needs to be weighed against the present Asian experience. I don't see any serious references to that comparison but I may have missed them.