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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (36837)	3/4/1999 12:20:00 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

The chicken or the egg. There is a feedback loop, when dictators feel threatened they try to make their people feel less secure. Those of us in the U.S. were very very lucky to have people like George Washington in our early history and bumpy but successfull transition to Thomas Jefferson. Compare that to the short lived democracy in Mexico in 1824. TP

To: DMaA who wrote (36837)	3/4/1999 12:27:00 PM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 67261

Then there is China, which has done a better job liberalizing the market than post- communist Russia, but remains a one- party dictatorship. Political freedom and economic freedom are not precisely the same, although I think that Milton Friedman is right, a substantial degree of economic freedom is necessary to democracy.

To: DMaA who wrote (36837)	3/4/1999 1:08:00 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

I thought this would be a good point to reprise one of my earlier posts: 1.)The greater the degree of political interference in the economy, the less economic efficiency and the more diluted is consumer sovereignty; 2.) The politicization of an economic sector will increase the power of the most interested parties in the long run, who will use it to cartelize the sector, to the advantage of established firms and the detriment of competition and innovation; 3.) Therefore, government should regulate minimally, merely establishing "rules of the road" and helping with infra- structure, and should limit the use of taxes, tariffs, trade missions, and the like to favor certain outcomes, since they distort the price structure, which is the best means of determining the efficient allocation of resources. My next tutorial will address the principle of subsidiarity.