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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • The big issue with “trying” communism is that it historically has only really occurred through violent revolution. The political instability in these situations gives a perfect opportunity for the seizing of power by exactly those kinds of people.

    Gradualist Socialism was the political project for Social Democrats in post-war Europe. They had 30-odd years to achieve it in several countries. The issue becomes that once they started notching up victories, radicalism decreased, and that when they’re not starving and oppressed people categorically will not vote to let someone collectivize their farms and expropriate their homes. It seems clear to me that in real-world conditions, a Socialist state can only come about through revolution, because the path in a democracy is far too long and leaves far too many angles of attack from a liberal opposition.


  • The TB one for instance found that TB gets worse whenever there is an IMF loan but not in the same circumstances when there is a loan from somewhere else.

    Yes, because the countries taking those loans aren’t distressed.

    There is a reason China’s loans are so popular.

    They are popular because they come with very little oversight. Countries with higher transparency do not find them very appealing, as Italy’s recent withdrawal from the program attests.

    You don’t seem to realize that IMF loan conditions have very specific governance requirements which directly impact governmental decisions around health spending.

    They come with very specific governance requirements which impact governmental decisions about a whole host of things, because those governments have proven incapable of sound fiscal management.

    Again, the IMF is in no way perfect and I’m sure there is a myriad ways the conditions of their loans can be tailored to minimize negative outcomes. But that does not mean they cause these problems any more than every cancer death being a failure of medicine means doctors cause cancer.


  • I’ve looked at all of the sources you provide, and they all point out the fact that countries experience bad outsomes after an IMF intervention, which nobody’s disputed. My argument is that countries in similar dire straights will experience even worse outcomes if there is no such intervention. As an example, I could name Venezuela, which experienced an extreme increase in child mortality, your favored metric, after leaving the IMF. The root cause is economic distress, not the IMF intervention.

    Minimizing the negative effects of government failure is absolutely worth examining. Identifying the mistakes made by the IMF in past interventions is a noble goal. But we should not blame international organizations when poor governance causes countries to fail.