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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (360671)	11/28/2007 6:23:19 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575535

East Germany grew under its dictatorship but all the wealth was siphoned off to its elite and Mother Russia. That's what happens in a dictatorship, not socialism. Thank you for confirming my point. Remove that communist dictatorship, and you allow for greater economic growth. Yes you start out poorer but that makes higher growth easier. Its easier to have rapid growth off of a small base (except perhaps if it is so small that there is almost no infrastructure, or skilled and/or educated people, and that was NOT the case in East Germany. Again, no country where freedoms are restricted grows at its pontential whether the economy is capitalistic or socialistic. The only exception I've seen is China. And I have to believe that freedoms are expanding in that country. Notice how growth rates in the countries in central and eastern Europe that have liberalized their economies has been high. East Germany was hardly the basket case of the communist block, so it doesn't provide an excuse for slower growth in Germany, let alone the slower overall growth in Europe. That's because W. Germany did something stupid......it brought the E. German Deutsch mark up to par with the W. German Deutsch mark all at once. Instead of making the E. Germans feel equal, all it managed to do was prevent new investment from going into E. Germany like what was happening in the other E. European satellites. Hence, it has taken E. German longer to turn than countries like the Czech Republic and the Baltic Republics. And btw, several of the former satellites continue to struggle......Poland being the prime example. Many of its young people are emigrating to other countries because they can't find work in Poland.