Posted on 02/25/2006 3:00:55 AM PST by Cannoneer No. 4
"It's really about the things that are not being said.Like:
"My company does business with the UAE and I stand to make a lot of money if the port deal goes through."
"I have a lot of stock in DP World and I stand to make a lot of money if the port deal goes through.""
suddenly, when i asked them to post the "anti-arab" statements by malkin, they became very quiet.
i think you are right.
maybe FR should require people to divulge their dubai and uae investments before posting on this thread!
Why is it drivel? Are you saying none of it is true?
Distorted and one-sided.
Bull$hit
Some are saying the sucess of the UAE is because of capitalism, I'm saying one must account for the reality of an influx of oil money in the UAE and that is the main reason for the UAE's success.
Those who say the UAE's success is because of capitalism (ignoring the influx of oil money) would also have to say the success of Chavez's Venezuela is because of socialism (also ignoring the influx of oil money). Sure the UAE exhibits characteristics of capitalism and Venezuela socialism, but what has made the real difference is oil money. In both cases oil money is greasing the countries ecomomies, the effect of oil money masks the effects of the their respective economic systems.
If you took oil money out of the equation those Saudi "capitalists" would be just like their nomadic ancestors who carried their wealth on camelback, and Chavez's Venezuela would be an absolute ecomomic failure like Zimbabwe.
So? Oil money is another name for capital. What you do with money decides whether it is capitalism or not. In both your examples I think the state has claimed the oil industry. It seems that the UAE is investing to make more money (capitalism). This is resulting in a very nice standard of living. Chavez is following another path of bad ideas which is producing more poverty.
This is way different than starting out with nothing like the US did and earning capital through hard work, before oil was even discovered. The US did not have the advantage of a huge supply of unearned capital to work with.
If you say the UAE has money because of capitalism, you would also have to say Venezuela has money because of socialism, when neither is the case, the reality is they won the oil money lottery. The poor in Venezuela have more now than they did before Chavez, would you say that is because of socialism? No, it is because oil money is greasing their economy to the point the poor have more, their standard of living has went up, which is why Chavez is so popular amoung the lower class there.
The US was capitalistic from the begining and unlike the nomadic ME countries was wealthy before oil.
If oil had not been discovered in the ME would the UAE have become a "capitalistic" country?? I highly doubt it as they had not embraced capitalism up to that point.
So, if the UAE got oil money, don't you think the US got money from generous natural resources, too, especially lots of land, in the beginning? Capitalism is not about hard work, it is about investing money to make a profit. That is why it is called capitalism instead of laborism.
If that is true how did capitalism get started? Where did the initial money come from??
Capitalism is not about "investing existing money" it is about investing one's ability and hard work to produce something that never existed before, ie new wealth, or capital. Capitalism is about producing goods that never existed before and exchanging them for money, or profit.
Capitalism is not speculating in the futures markets, that is just churning existing capital, and it is not winning a class action law suit, these are just examples of a couple of capitalism's parasites.
Natural resources are meaningless and worthless without applying human ability and hard work to turn them into something that never existed before and something desirable to other human beings. Capitalism says you get to keep what you worked for, ie profit. Profit is the motivator to invest one's ability and hard work. That is the difference between capitalism and economic systems in which the motivator is the good of your fellow man. The US did not "get money from generous natural resources in the beginning", its citizens busted their butts investing ability and hard work to create new wealth using those natural resources, no one handed it to us. And we didn't rip off an existing industry built through someone else's ability and hard work, no, we earned it for ourselves.
Have you by chance read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged? That book shows how true hands off capitalism works more than any other source I know of. I highly recommend it.
I am not sure that anyone used the term capitalism before Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital. He, of course, drew a line between the capitalists who invested their money in the means of production and thereby claimed profits and the workers who he thought provided all of the value and were entitled to all of the yield of an enterprise.
You are arguing something different and it is getting to be semantics. The problem with the hard work argument is that lots of people work hard who never get rich. Preindustrial Europe and colonial America were societies of artisans and sole proprietors with yoemen farmers, too. They developed a bourgeoise who devised ways of pooling money and sharing risk to embark on bigger ventures, especially trading. They departed from medieval strictures against usury which Islam still preaches. This, strictly speaking, was the birth of capitalism. And, for all intents and purposes there was very little money in those days.
I prefer the term free enterprise to describe my own economic beliefs, because it is free of the Marxist tinge.
I get the Any Rand newsletter, by the way. I doubt she would make the Arabs won the oil lottery argument you began with. So what? Like any other lottery winners the questions are what use are they making of their money and why does the government wrongly take so much of it?
She always referred to her philosophy as "objectivism" and economic system of choice as "Laissez-faire" capitalism, which simply means hands off capitalism.
No, I have not read that one. I guess she was a great friend of Alan Grnspan. Thanks for the term. I couldn't think of objectivism.
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