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

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (237573)	7/23/2007 7:28:29 PM
From: arun gera	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

>Your argument is that the sins of the father shall be visited on the son. > The property laws encourage passing property down the gene pool. So the benefits do pass down. So why not the sins? You can do simple math. If A and B are equally hardworking and have 100 units of assets, and A takes B's 70 unit assets in the year 1800 from B. Now A has 170 units and B has 30 units. Actually, just by compounding alone, the absolute differences in the assets between the inheritors of the assets of A and B will become extremely large after 200 years. And relative difference will be fairly substantial too. You don't even have to bring in any other factors such as genes. -Arun

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (237573)	7/23/2007 7:47:09 PM
From: arun gera	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

>Your racist ideology, to really lay it on thick, means that Obama and Condoleezza [one of them with no slave ancestors in the USA] would collect cash from some Jewish immigrant whose family was killed in Dachau and from some poor Vietnamese immigrant who lost their family to napalm in Vietnam.> No reparations are perfect. When Merck gets sued for a bad drug and has to settle a class action suit, all new employees of Merck take a hit for the mistakes or crimes of other employees who may have left the company. You are confusing ethics with practically of distribution. Just because there may not be a practical or fair way to provide reparations to descendents of slaves, does not mean that a theft did not happen. Actually, I am not trying to provide excuses for India. You are trying to provide excuses for the British. That the British (and their Indian administrators) did not do enough to prevent famines when they were in power, is a fact. So they have to be ascribed some blame for their negligence when it happened. The British were certainly decent rulers overall, otherwise such a large number of subjects would not have let them exist in power. -Arun

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (237573)	7/23/2007 7:58:58 PM
From: arun gera	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

>It takes barely 20 years to come right if private property is fully protected and capital can flow freely and thieving governments keep their paws off the loot.> Why did it take USA 400 years to banish the last vestiges of slavery? Some people say that the effects are still not gone. Why is it taking Europe so long to come together. They are only 400 million people with less diversity than India's 1 billion people. Some things just take time... -Arun

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (237573)	7/23/2007 8:04:20 PM
From: arun gera	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

>India voted itself poor. The ruling class were far worse than the British. The silly Indians booted out the British but kept the British bureaucracy, red tape, added kleptocracy and corruption. They even tried to get rid of English language, which would have been awful as you wouldn't have been able to receive my amazing words of wisdom. The Indian rulers are not all that popular as the assassinations showed. Rulers are rulers and having particular genes doesn't make them more suitable for the local yokels. That idea is just racism [to super heavily belabour the point].> I was never arguing that point. I agree to all the points above. In spite of all these faults in the Indian rulers, their were no big famines in post-independece India, while there were during the British Raj. So maybe, there was some difference in the style of governing. Maybe gene pool matters. -Arun

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (237573)	7/23/2007 8:22:14 PM
From: arun gera	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

>They had policies which allowed capital to flow in AND OUT!!> True. And one of the policy was being in a favorable trade relationship with the economic guerilla, USA. You are in the camp with the Strong - you get success faster. You move against the winner, you slow down economically. With the winner - Saudi Arabia, Iran before 1975, Chile, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Ireland (after peace negotiations), China (after Nixon's deal). Not with the Strong - Castro's Cuba. Iraq of Saddam's later years. India during the soviet phase (1965 to 1990), Iran after Islamic rule. Democracy and free markets or freedom and progress don't seem to matter as the economically winner countries don't seem to have that in common. The favorable relationship with the Strong seems to be a bigger factor. That capitalism was stronger than communism as an economic system seems to uncontested. At one time, countries were betting one way or the other. The countries that linked with the wrong Strong man lost out. As a corollary, when the power shifts to China, a different set of nations may benefit. -Arun