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Edited on Wed Jun-29-05 01:45 PM by murdoch
Friedman mentions the massive EU subsidies at the beginning but forgets to mention them at the end. In fact as recently as 2003 Ireland was still getting subsidies to the tune of billions a year. Before those subsidies, Ireland was under the thumb of England (the six counties still are), and then were going nowhere - until the subsidies.
Another thing to consider is the location and timing. In the late 1960's France, Germany and England were built up. Italy was built up as well, in the north at least, as was Scandinavia. Ireland had geographical advantages - it was closer to the US than England, France and Germany (and had lots of emigrees there), and it was close to England, France and Germany, to the east of which was the Warsaw pact. The English had almost completely successfully destroyed the Gaelic language, so Irish residents could speak the same language the English and Americans speak. It was the perfect place for all these NATO countries to dump the excess of capital they had in the 1960s into.
Friedman doesn't mention the fastest growing economy in the world - China. Mao fought a war against foreign influences - first the Japanese, then the US. William Hinton wrote a book about coming back to a remote Chinese agricultural village 20 years after the PRC was declared - it had gone from a place where some of the most valuable possessions were the contents of people's privies for fertilizer (since they couldn't afford animals) to an industrialized town. And after that time, production growth really took off. And China is a much larger country than Ireland.
Also, China keeps it's own house in order, it doesn't give a hoot if foreign capital is unhappy with its inability to pull money out, or if foreign exchange wants China to float its money and whatnot. If China allowed foreign capitalists to control its economy, it would become the kind of shambles that Thailand, Indonesia, and the asian tigers became in the 1990s. Also remember that hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were killed to build "a consensus around the whole package with labor and management" and they work today in miserable, abominable conditions, and when anyone complains about it they are often killed, this must be the "bumps in the road" Friedman is talking about.
Ireland fought the British imperialists out with guns, as did China. A nation must take its own destiny into its hands, and then, like China, allow foreign money in on the nation's own terms. In Ireland's case, Europe was very generous, Ireland kind of lucked out (as did South Korea, which was a basketcase compared to North Korea's economy until the 1970s). Latin America took Friedman's advice for the past few decades and the result was bread riots in Argentina. Latin America has swung to the left because they know TF's advice is BS.
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