Yep, there's no evidence of pure, laissez faire, completely market dependent capitalism at work anywhre, and never has been. And given the environmental state of our over-crowded planet, Fidel, I cannot celebrate what is happening over there as a triumph of socialism. Show me evidence that that is what Marx wanted humanity to achieve (no Lenin please), the grandkids inheriting a world where survival is the first order of the day.
Oh I agree, George, it's not an ideal situation by any means. I think that NEP Lenin's wasn't working and that something had to be done before western aggression part II. And that was in the skunkworks as the Sovs fully expected. There were no successful economic models to follow then in the 1920's-30's, except for perhaps the oldest agrarian model. But neither the Soviets nor the fascists were going to leave things to each other's design. And it wasn't working for us here in North America either. We were looking at either global fascism or Soviet communism. We were going to have a cold war either way, and no country could afford to pursue laissez-faire market ideology then and still expect to be a free country sometime down the road. And the most powerful countries have been subsidizing agriculture quite heavily ever since FDR and Stalin etc and even using food exports to dominate other countries' economies. Globalization today is anything but laissez-faire. It is an extremely tightly regulated and centrally planned system. US economist [url=http://www.michael-hudson.com/articles/diverse/701218EconomicsNobelSamue... Hudson[/url] describes as:
Countries are to give their economic surplus to the United States as exports and they are to serve as markets for whatever the United States can produce in excess, mainly agricultural crops and military equipment -
And he says that Samuelsson's equillibrium theory while followed around the world is wreaking havoc with economies. Abject poverty is a sterile expression of this theory for far too many people around the world. Wages and incomes have diverged greatly around the world with greatest differences between creditor and debtor nations.
We've seen unprecedented consumption in the last 25 years with neoliberal capitalism. It's been nothing but super-charged consumption. And we realize now , or at least I do, because environmentalists and Marxists have been saying it since before I was born, that it's unsustainable. And who is responsible for spreading the lie about middle class prosperity based on consumerism? It wasn't the Sovs or China and especially not India during the cold war era. The whole world was lied to, constantly.