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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: can.politics
Subject: Re: Re: Better DEAD than RED
Message-ID: <5703@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 18-Jun-85 17:45:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.5703
Posted: Tue Jun 18 17:45:41 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 18-Jun-85 17:45:41 EDT
References: <893@mnetor.UUCP> <5642@utzoo.UUCP> <896@mnetor.UUCP>, <972@mnetor.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 28

> Don't fool yourself, we enjoy a higher standard of living because we
> support dictatorships in developping countries who support big western
> multinationals who plunder their resources and use their people as slaves.

Don't fool yourself.  This may -- repeat, may, although I don't believe
it -- be the reason why our higher standard of living continues, but it
is most emphatically not the way we got to this point in the first place.

It is fashionable, particularly in developing countries, to blame the
big bad developed countries and the big bad multinationals for the woes
of the rest of the world.  This overlooks major factors such as cultural
issues (e.g., involvement in commerce considered a mark of low status)
and government mismanagement (e.g., monopolization of resources and
capital by the small elite that runs most "developing" countries [not
just the right-wing dictatorships, either!]).  Multinationals are popular
scapegoats because they divert attention away from the need to make
disruptive and unpopular changes to overcome internal problems.

The western nations did not reach their position of economic and cultural
dominance by trampling others (although once they reached it there was
indeed quite a bit of trampling).  They reached it by a form of natural
selection:  they developed a culture that was better suited to rapid
progress and internal economic growth than the world's other cultures.
The undoubted evils perpetrated against some developing societies by
some western entities should not blind us to this.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry