El Salvador/Bukele

marching?

Idk. This sort of seems like saying North Korea is a great model because there are no gangs and crime is almost nonexistent. Plus they can march like mf'ers.

Walking in unison in a militaristic manner. Like in a...parade.

Isn't the US government or indeed state governments empowered to declare Martial law in times of emergency? Couldn't this be akin to that? To clarify I'm not saying it can't be abused, but if you have a situation where gangs rule and the murder rate is sky high, maybe desperate measures are called for, albeit temporarily?

I personally hate in general the idea of going in the streets, it feels like something communists do (I am in Italy).

I am 41 and I only went protesting against vax mandates for covid (as a vaxxed person) because that felt like the only actual fascist rule ever implemented in my country since I am an adult interested in politics.

I'm just joking with you. I doubt if I would agree with your politics but fwiw, I find you kinda likeable on a personal level.😉
Are you from Milan by any chance?

Bologna, First city in the world, or so we claim, to have abolished slavery legally (liber paradisus, 1256).

we also invented mortadella and tortellini on the side, and some people claim our university is the oldest in Europe, 1088 (I know we are second beyond Paris but I don't want to be killed in the streets you know)

Not bolognese? Weird.

we have our version of ragout but if you call it bolognese, It Is not our sauce.

if it has meatballs, that's because of Disney dog cartoon we don't have meatballs in our sauce

Spaghetti bolognese here is spaghetti + beef mince + tomato sauce. Would have naively assumed it's from Bologna. One of my favourite dishes incidentally.

vaguely yes but, our sauce is 60% beef 40% pork, very little tomato, carrot, celery, onion chopped thinly, extremely slow cooking.

and we don't use it with spaghetti ever.

it's gramigna or tagliatelle

Looks delicious!

I agree with the general concept of declaring martial law for extreme situations. I guess what makes me a little uncomfortable is that in recent US cases it is usually a limited use in a defined area, like one city or a few cities. Its usually short lived.

But it seems like with El Salvador it is a countrywide suspension of many rights and its been going on for a couple of years now. So it has more of a feel of an authoritarian government suspending rights to effectively restructure governmental powers long term.

But I havent really done any reading on this and its just a first impression.

I think the main takeaway of El Salvador is that allowing high levels of crime is a choice, and isn't an inevitable outcome of poverty or wealth inequality, as the left proclaims. There are trade-offs of course, there always is. But as most of us who have any sense already know, this just demonstrates another glaring example that the entire premise of leftism is just wrong.

The most recent case is Justin Trudeau invoking the Canada's Emergency Act over the Truckers a few years ago . We can see there how government powers went to far . It pales in comparison to what El Salvador has done though I would say they had cause

wealth inequality certainly has nothing to do with crime in general, while absolute poverty levels almost certainly do generate higher propensity to crime and i don't think that's a leftist claim/theory of society.

I agree that given X propensity for crime, it's always a choice how to react and you often can fix/reduce it (but not necessarily all the times).

I mean part of Bukele success is actually managing to reduce crime, it wasn't obvious even with the use of emergency powers.

Yeah the length of time it's been happening is troubling for me also and an argument can certainly be made for an abuse of power.

Didnt picketys research show different re inequality

Piketty spent most of the book describing how wealth inequality is self reinforcing basically, with very little discussion of purported causal effects on economic growth of wealth inequality itself.

He then got debunked on the r>g thesis but that's another topic.

In general literature about inequality and economic growth focuses much more on income inequality (where at extreme levels the idea of it being a drag in economic growth seems to have a basis) than in wealth inequality, which even if they might appear as close relatives, actually are a world apart.

Think of the sp500, simplify things by imagining it's all owned by American households, and try to describe a model in which if the top 25% owns 90% of it, economic growth is sensibly higher than if the top 10% owns 90%, under the same income distribution in both cases.

Try qualitatively, logically, why should gdp growth, the total quantity of value produced by society, have any relationship with wealth inequality in general, within broad but not extreme ranges? Why would companies invest less, why would people consume less? Why would workers work less or less efficiently ?

If anything if a society is very rich , and wealth is very spread around, people will work LESS, because they will be able to get more leisure time more broadly.

A society where everyone is a partial rentier is a society that, all else equal, produces LESS than one where most people have to work a lot to keep up with the Joneses and pay bills right?

I am pretty sure you actually could fix/reduce it all the time, if you were able to diagnose the problem correctly, and had the will to do what it took to fix it. But progressive ideology pretty much guarantees you will go 0-2 in this respect, so kind of a moot point.

https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/f...

-Ireland being so high on the list is pretty surprising. All the other countries near the top makes sense. I dont think anyone regards any of the countries near the top as having cultures of hard working, so maybe story checks out.

ireland is a tax haven

the gdp figure is inflated due to the onshoring of corporate assets which have nothing to do with ireland, and which ireland does not tax. for example, worldwide royalties on apple patents, with a base cost of $300 billion, are included in the irish GDP figure, because it is notionally the irish branch of apple which owns those patents. none of it reaches the irish government's coffers.

ireland recently went to go to court to prevent the eu from forcing ireland to charge €14 billion of tax on those assets, and won.

you read that right. the irish government went to court to fight for their right not to receive €14bil from apple

the distorting effects of all this got so bad they had to stop using gdp and instead use gni, but then that was also ****ed so they had to stop using gni start using modified gni*

here's the full, boring, story

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_g...

The judgment of a few capable, ambitious revolutionaries

Next phase is mentorship for the prisoners. lol

Aren't we trying to reeducate one another?

Ireland suffers an accounting problem which used to be only a footnote on the definition of GDP, because of multinational companies presence and the small size of the island.

basically a significant portion of many multinationals value added is booked as being generated in Ireland for tax purposes (but it isn't) so it looks like the total value added of the Irish economy is higher than it is