"We're here to change our history... we're taking over," Mr Morales said.
2006-01-22
Bolivia's Indigenous President: "We're Taking Over"
Evo Morales has been sworn in as Bolivia's first indigenous president, pledging to end "500 years" of injustice against his people.
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This article raises a question that effectively never gets asked: Why is it that *everyone* with a Spanish last name who immigrates to the USA gets affirmative action, and labled a "minority", yet this is not so with people who have English last names? All (effectively all) the black slaves in the USA got English last names. But many people in the USA with English sir names have zero African ancestors (for the past 100,000 years).
So why do the race-catalogers believe that a Spanish last name automatically designates a person as a "minority"? Does it make sense that when the rich honkeys in Bolivia who get their wealth confiscated can move to the US and their children can get into Harvard and UM-AA with "minority" status? These guys with last names of "Gomez" are no less honkey than George Bush.
Horay. No an "indiginous" person is presedent. Will this mater if poverty increases? This new president says that the free market "doesn't work in Bolivia." This means either that the laws of economics miraculously don't apply in Bolivia, or that a free market has not really been tried. I am sure of two things:
1. "Nationalization" of resources in Bolivia will lead to increased poverty and migration.
2. The proponents of these changes will blame all the resulting calamities on the devil US.
The economic "theory" of capitalism is just that - a "theory" just as socialist and feudalist theories exist.
We will see what happens in Bolivia, but obviously the reforms that have been forced on the country by the IMF aren't working.
A "theory" is a hypothesis that has survived rigorous testing (ie, attempts to disprove it). "Theory" is the absolute highest achievement for a scientific explanation. Thus if you call an ideas a "theory", you have put a crown on it! This idea belongs on the shelf next to Newton's "Theories" of Motion!
So, Nadir, I believe you are trying to disparage "capitalism" as a mere "hypothesis", which is a scientific statement that both explains and predict an observable phenomenon, and which has either been insuffiently tested, or has been tested and disproven. I don't think that you can charactorize "capitalism" as either untested, or disproved! To the contrary, capitalism has been thorougly tested, and its validity effects itself by many of our essential daily activities.
Socialism also qualifies as a hypothesis, and one that has been thorougly tested. Many people obviously differ on their interpretations of the results. Others I believe ignore the results and focus on the promise of this view. The results have compelled different economists to arrive at two competing statements of the socialism, one that predicts an achievement of "wealth distribution and social justice," and the other that predicts erradication of wealth and economic stagnation. So we have at least two main statements of socialist theory, with people like you and me taking different views of which one accurately predicts the outcome of implimenting socialism.
Capitalism and socialism have established themselves as economic facts. As for capitalism, it is an indisputable fact that if we establish a monetary system, you can loan me money and I can use that money to produce corn or software that others in the economy will pay me for at a value higher than the original loan amount. That is one of the simplest statements of the capitalist theory. Surely you do not dispute that. What you dispute are some of the various ancillary hypotheses/theories that derive from the basic statement of capitalism. One of these would be the Free Market hypothesis, which predicts a maximum amount of total wealth, and wealth distribution, if capitalism has a miniumum amount of restraints, such as taxation.
This is where I think you have your beef, not with the validitity of the law of capital. The term "law", by the way, means a theory that can be simply expressed, usually in the form of a mathimatic expression.
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