Re: Let's discuss
@拓海
You seem to put a lot of emphasis on military strength. Even though that used to be important, I think the world is moving away from military action. When was the last time a war took place between major countries? Even invasions of weaker countries are becoming rare. America attacking Iraq and Russia attacking Georgia were the last cases of this happening that I know about. And big countries do get a lot of backlash when they do this, even from their own people. More recently there have only been civil wars where factions within a country fight each other, and occasionally smaller countries fighting each other. The conflict between India and China recently was the closest we've gotten to a big war, but tensions were diffused. Same with the conflict between India and Pakistan. Most countries these days settle issues without the need for military action. While the UN can be pretty useless at times and definitely needs to be reformed, it does at least help create more cooperation.
I do think I get where you're coming from with the democracy thing though, but I don't agree with it. Not all governments have the interests of all its people at heart. Especially in countries with a lot of different ethnic groups, a government might just favour a select group of people rather than the entire country. South Africa during apartheid was a good example, the government was run by people of European descent who, even though they were a minority of the population, favoured their own at the expense of the rest of the people. With democracy the people can hold the government accountable, and replace them if they don't perform. This doesn't necessarily work out in practice though, there are too many other factors that cause people to vote for a government that fails them. It does sometimes happen that governments without democracy do well. Rwanda for example was devastated by a civil war, and the current government took over in 1994, the same year we gained our democracy. And yet they've managed to successfully develop Rwanda quite well, even though it is a small country with not much resources. In contrast, even though we did well initially, corrupt politicians managed to take over after some time and progress essentially stalled and even decreased. But there are also counterexamples. Botswana has been a democracy since it gained independence, and it also very successfully managed to develop itself from extreme poverty. Other dictatorships such as Zimbabwe have failed disastrously. So it's not necessarily the case that one model leads to more prosperity, but I think across the world on average democracies do better than governments where the people don't have a say.
So socialism seems to be a good model, as evidenced by the fact that socialist countries like some in Europe do very well, and are the happiest and some of the most prosperous countries in the world. The problem though is for socialism to work, you need money to spend. When you have a situation like in South Africa where the majority of the population does not earn enough to be taxed, the government just doesn't have the revenue to spend on the kind of ambitious costly programs you need to for example provide good quality free health care. This is probably also the case for most other developing countries. So I guess socialism is a good model for developed countries, but it probably needs some threshold of the population to be well off already before it can become effective. I might be wrong, but it just doesn't seem to work in poor nations. Capitalism obviously has many problems, notably the massive inequality that it seems to cause. But at least it does seem to lead to development of the economy, even if the benefits of this development mainly accrues to a select class of people. But those people can start businesses and provide jobs. It is also true that businesses exploit people and try to underpay them, but any salary is better than nothing, it's money those people otherwise wouldn't have had. I do think you can't just have a completely unregulated libertarian-style free market though, there need to be government controls to at least try to reign in some of the worst excesses of capitalism. Other posts have mentioned the tragedy of the commons that happens if there is no regulation in place to prevent people from exploiting public goods. That's why we need for example regulations to prevent pollution, because it's not in an individual or company's interest to spend more money if it doesn't benefit them.
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