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This is populist vision of corruption, which is fair. However, I am familiar with a "reasonably corrupt" country, where deep hatred of the political class is r
by pizza234 9y ago
This is populist vision of corruption, which is fair.
However, I am familiar with a "reasonably corrupt" country, where deep hatred of the political class is radical, and I can tell you that the population is as much corrupted as the political class, just, in smaller scale.
I am also familiar with a "reasonably uncorrupted" country, where there isn't a radical hatred towards the political class, and interestingly, the population is significantly more orderly and civil than the former.
In this perspective, I'm very skeptical about the long-term advantages of money transfers when compared to social/infrastructural investments.
- mcv 9y agoReality is indeed a lot more complex than the simple black and white picture of my previous comment. I still think that for example the banks who loaned untenable loans to Greece should have taken that loss, rather than have Germany bail them out. In that case, the loans helped keep government mismanagement alive because they allowed the governments to pretend everything was fine. But there are also cases where providing those loans is still the lesser evil. Still, I do want banks and other moneylenders to take more responsibility for who they're loaning money to, and what's being done with that money. And I think it's unfair to punish people for having lived under a bad government they had no control over. It seems attractive to combine those two goals. But money spent on improving the lives of the people, through infrastructure, education and medicine, is (almost?) always money well-spent.