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October 17, 2005
Notes from Ferdy - If Israel is Not a Third World Country, Why is Anbar Worried?
Sometimes, even a superior life form like myself can get conned by the mainstream press. For two days now we have heard over and over the basic mantra that the new Iraq constitution would lead to a wealthy north and south and an impoverished central region. This is supposed to explain why the Sunnis, who are concentrated in the central part of Iraq, tried to stop the constitution in last weekend's referendum.
This analysis suffers from a fatal flaw: it's not lack of raw materials that causes poverty, it's bad government.
For decades, we've had a perfect laboratory experiment in stupid government going on in Korea. We have two nations located in the same penninsula with the same ethnicity and the same cultural history, one with a stupid government and one with a capitalist democratic government. The capitalists are driving one of the most succesful economies in the world while the people ruled by the idiots are starving.
If you don't like that example, consider East Germany and West Germany before the Berlin Wall came down.
Or consider Israel. Israel has no oil, and over half the country is a desert, yet the poverty rate for Israel is one-third the level it is in Arab nations. This is not because Jews are smarter than Arabs, or because Arabs are being punished for allowing Christians to live in Arab lands: it is because Israel is not a dictatorship.
I think this is a message people need to hear.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
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