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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (1176)	8/2/2008 6:03:08 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86355

You're mistaken if you think poor countries are unregulated and untaxed. They usually have high marginal tax rates and are very heavily regulated. So much so that private initiative is suppressed. we became richer when we became more regulated. We became more regulated as we became richer. The regulations followed the riches not the other way round. one of which is that we were very rich in oil Which doesn't explain why we were richer before the oil era. Course you can say we were rich in wood, I guess. And another reason is the "bread basket"; unlike a lot of other countries we didn't have to worry so much about food production... we had a huge area with the richest soil in the world. Yes, we were rich in fertile land. And unlike the situation in most contemporary African countries, the federal government didn't require farmers to sell their crops to federal agencies which gyped them on the price. There h/b real world experiments run over the last century - East Germany vs West Germany, N Korea vs S Korea, Taiwan-Hong Kong-Singapore vs Communist China and they have shown that economic freedom and economic growth are definitely related. Other less extreme contrasts showing similar results are Chile vs other Latin American countries, Ireland vs European economies, Botswana vs other African countries.