Quote:
Originally Posted by Alessio
I would love to hear about how this Marshall Plan, consisting of aid worth a total of 12 billion dollars for 17 countries, stimulated our economies, while the 4 to 7 billion euros a year, totalling over a hundred billion euro since the second world war, the Netherlands alone spends on foreign aid does nothing.
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It's because there is a difference between trade and aid.
In brief, the argument goes like this. The less developed countries would possibly have a comparative advantage in agricultural products and grocery products (mostly because, we can all imagine how effective it is to farm grain and pigs in say a country like Finland in compared to a country like Ukraine). This comparative advantage never goes realized due to trade barriers, tariffs, and subsidies (if you add up subsidies and such to the price of home grown grain in Finland, the price goes up 400%. this means, you'd need an unrealistic advantage to import it realistically. even the transit pollutes argument is a load of crap considering the amounts of piss they pour into the ground just to have anything grow here).
The (food) aid essentially does **** all. You can send all the clothes and all the peanuts and raisins there you ever want, but it's not going to help their infrastructure. The difference between Marshall Plan and LDC aid is that the Marshall plan was aimed to stimulate the economies: LDC aids are aimed to feed people, but not really to achieve anything else on the long run. To add to this, you're being a blunt moron by comparing two non-inflation cleaned numbers together to have some strength on your argument. Please, if you're about to compare figures in terms of economics, at least be arsed to compare them on real terms, not nominal terms. Using nominal terms to make up ground on your arguments may fool idiots, but makes you look really, really dumb in the eyes of anyone half-educated.
Next, there's the economic assassin tactic. The perfect example of this is Iraq (the same shit hits all over the fan in different degrees). First, you destroy the country. Then, you lend the country money to rebuild: on terms you decide, eg. your producers get to work out the rebuilding. The country is irreversibly endebted. Alternatively, you can just have a multinational corp dig out the shit off the ground there and sell it back to them prospected and worked. While western countries' governments and public sectors still hold some leverage over multinationals, this is not the case for less developed countries. Bolivia's a good case too. As terms of aid for the medical plans, the Americans courteously offered to "buy" their public water system for equities, which was essentially sold to American Corps. Well, hardly to anyone's surprise, the prices of water skyrocketed in the next few years, and any aid ever received elsewhere paled in comparison to this.
Sure, you can keep implying that you think Africans and Asians are dumb and shit people, which is, what you're essentially saying: you're just ignoring a good load of details. I'd personally rather not be dragged into innuendo on which race is superior, seeing as the economic standpoint is to begin with not necessarily an optimal one. You can discuss why Africans didn't invent nuclear power first with Max Weber's Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. But this "you said that not me" -shitass idiocy is just really really dull.