Another note on free markets.
For example, I don't consider the US a free market country by any stretch of the imagination, and it gets worse every year. People who consider the US a free market country don't understand what a free market is. People who point to the US as a bastion of freedom and economic equality simply are wrong (in my opinion). And certainly I don't believe that crony capitalism, or crony fascism, or any other kind of cronyism, supports or leads to a free market, nor does it help the general population in any way.
I have a friend who recently got citizenship here and he (semi-) jokingly made a comment that he was going to vote for Cristina (he wasn't actually able to vote in this election) because she's good for him economically since he doesn't depend on Argentine wages and economy. He's thinking of various issues here that I won't go into, but one of them is the way the blue dollar has far exceeded the official value of the peso to the dollar. He's been here off and on for about as long as I have, but never as committed to living here permanently over that time range as I have been, until the last few years.
It seems to me that I remember things a bit differently than he does since he didn't live full time here at first, and it also has a lot to do with the fact that I came here for business and watched a country that was beginning to feel optimism about its future again fall into the same sort of traps it always has - a populist leader telling the poor they need a cult leader to make life better for them instead of concentrating on actually making conditions better for everyone here and encouraging people to lift themselves out of the muck.
This idea of overly-controlled economies from governments that at best are given direction by politicians seeking power rather than for reasons of altruism has me tired. It rarely works. When it does it's because the whole country works together and benefits together, not because one class is played off against the other in perpetual class warfare. For some 40 years, since I became at least somewhat interested in politics, I've watched these things played out like it's some kind of new idea and now that I've lived a decade in a country where I can see first-hand the effects, it nauseates me.
I'd rather take the hardship because the economy has fallen and real reforms are made that mean things are going to be lean and hard to deal with, but with a possibility of a brighter future, than maintain the emperor's new clothes for years, and until things become literally unbearable, because people are afraid of the consequences of fixing the actual problems that abound. Hardships caused by fixing something, in other words, are much easier to handle than problems caused by stupidity, or naivete, or apathy.
