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To give the critic of Bukele his due, the policies he's pursuing are remedial, akin to a father who can only restore of the family he failed to discipline be harsh beatings of violent and manipulative sons. I understand that he must circumvent the corrupt judiciary, as it has become a de facto arm of the gangs, but the policies Bukele pursues are the groundwork for a coercive government unaccountable to their people. I am not saying that he shouldn't pursue these policies--El Salvador is really in a state of emergency--but these solutions are indicative of a deeper disease. I think an ordered hierarchy of power is necessary to prevent a society from making the tradeoffs (unaccountable gov't control vs. violent gang control) that Bukele makes. Only when there are tiered, non-central nodes of power (think Charlemagne, his lords below him, and the lords below them) that have real authority and real coercive force do you find a third option between a powerful state and chaos in the streets.
As a note, I know that Bukele is crushing it in the polls. I am not saying that he is not popular or unqualifiedly unpopular; I am simply saying that the groundwork he is laying can used to circumvent any accountability.
Given that Bukele is attempting to woo network state elite human capital and all, I'm not sure democratic accountability is particularly important. (Rule of law around property would be though.)
So the regime(s) are putting the woke away, as AA predicted. But it's no time to be sanguine. There's a lot of work to do to just get back to normal a la the 90s, never mind a society with morals. I share your view of the Grateful Dead. I am a young Boomer. I missed all the 60s nonsense (thank God!) and frankly thought their music was kind of boring. My rebellion was punk rock in the late 70s.
Not surprising; I doubt most of the people who read the Economist would maintain their idealism if their own neighborhoods hit the murder rate of pre-Bukele El Salvador
Yes. And aren't there just going to have to be some seriously hard trade-offs (big style) coming down the line in the years ahead.... now that our poisonous woke intelligentsia has unglued everything that held our democratic liberalism together. As I wrote about in this piece: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Hey Niccolo. What's your take the expected retaliation by Iran? How do you view constant headlines like "US asks Iran not to escalate.", "Iran to retaliate in calibrated manner "?
Looking forward to it! I ask because I suspect you'll agree that it feels kind of performative to telegraph a supposedly effective retaliation for days on the news. I wonder how you read this in the context of turbo-america.
If democracy is so good, why does it come with so many problems: corrupt judges, self-serving politicians, double standards, election fraud, usurpation of power, vague, ambiguous laws, continuous growth of government, disparity of income, elites, oligarchs, politicalization of everything, ever increasing taxes, political parties, over-regulation, government-corporate-media collusion, unresponsiveness to popular wants & needs, secrecy, surveillance, censorship, . . . . . .
The "democracy" as export commodity model trotted out by neocons and their leftist counterparts is incoherent in the context of both practice and meaning. Genuine democracy requires extremely specific conditions to develop and persist without which its sudden attempted imposition produces mass misery (e.g. Libya, Syria, Iraq - compare average living standards and religious freedom before and after). The definition of "democracy" also shifts depending upon the goals of the imposing hegemon (this has not been lost on African countries which is one of the reasons China is prevailing over Western powers with little costs). Note that the Economist/neocon crowd also has a distaste for Kagame, a military genius who stopped a genocide (note that there were no Western interventions to impose "democracy" during the genocide) and engineered an economic miracle in a country without significant resources.
People are not interchangeable. Self-government under the rule of law evolved only in a handful of specific conditions in a few, fairly atypical, societies. And the peaceful change of government was pioneered by tiny, cohesive, elites prepared to forego the thrills of revenge and rapine for the assurance of private property and due process. Expecting the Global Majority to reproduce the instincts and behaviours of Whig England is fatuous. Cheering on the Global Majority at their worst (South Africa or Gaza) as so many do is the height of insanity.
I dread what is going to unfold in North America and elsewhere across the West.
Well, it's not like the previous administration was super accountable. Assuming they could achieve accountability in the first place is the issue. For some places and peoples, a Bukele is the best you can hope for.
My biggest problem with Bukele is the question what his long term vision is. The longer you keep people in prison the less suitable they are for the labor market and the more embedded they will be in the criminal mindset. Remember that Bukele throws the net very wide: many of those arrested are not (yet) criminals.
A second problem is that the lawlessness that the police can now indulge in tends to contaminate the rest of society. If you have a property dispute with your neighbor and he has a brother with the police you have a good chance to become one of the 77000.
I see this kind of policies as the criminal equivalent of "get rich quickly". We have seen many of them before and in the end they were all found to cause much more harm then they solved: three-strikes-out, broken-windows, zero tolerance for soft drugs, etc.
What's your solution? In India they have a caste system. The pressure is off to excel. It's great because of this. Less talented people are happier. The West's endless need to be a winner by hook or by crook doesn't work, in my humble opinion. True, the occasional diamond in the rough cannot move upward but in general there is little criminal behavior in a very poor country.
My solution would be to go Rodrigo and erase the 77,000 scumbags from the face of the earth. As of now they’re a massive jailbreak / insurrection waiting to happen - only a matter of time.
The Economist, a journal I subscribed to for most of 30 years, has become another victim of the globalist takeover. To be pitied more than reviled.
Just wait until middle America gets a taste of what Biden's illegals are capable of. The apologetics of white liberalism will be tested against the appetites of the Global Majority.
Middle America is so full of 💩 their very breathe could fertilize the Sinai.
“Hate has no place here …”
..,. Meanwhile, Mommy sits on the school board and daddy will sit on the zoning board and keep the “Canadians” out. That’s how mittel bourgeois America says “Niggers” for those of you who don’t understand our WI PIPO Cant. Yes. We have our own linga franca …
As far as the illegals, as the Spanish are like the Italians and don’t kill without a reason, and kill among their own, not so unpopular. Unless it costs money, in which case Karen-Frauer will do them in… locally.
Those of us on the right should not take the French "fight" against wokeness too seriously. It’s just two siblings fighting, so there won't be any changes to the underlying Enlightenement based paradigms that created both the American woke and French laicite liberalism. It's almost like the Sunnis and Shias fighting it out in some God forsaken Middle Eastern country. Does it really matter to other religious minorities, which side wins? So it goes with the French "war" on wokeness.
I think you're misrepresenting the concept of anarchotyranny somewhat...as coined by Sam Francis the tyranny part doesn't refer to an eventual law and order backlash of the Bukele type, but rather to the repression by supposedly liberal states against people objecting to the anarcho part in the term (e. g. mass illegal immigration which is enabled through deliberate non-enforcement of laws, disproportionate crime rates of certain demographics enabled by lax punishment even for violent crimes, while hate speech legislation is steadily expanded).
This dynamic is also a crucial part of the rise of AfD's support in Germany btw. The foreign policy stuff, alleged pro-Russian sentiment etc. is much less important.
That was my thought as well, thank you for saving me the trouble of looking up the source :) the problem of the state allowing anarchy to reign such that the people need protecting, while only protecting the interests of the government and enforcing laws against law abiding citizens is the current MO of western tyranny. The recent FISA madness in the USA is a prime example.
Transnationalist NGOs like Amnesty International and neoliberal outlets like the Economist sure do have a weird affinity for extortionist thugs. I'm certain that's just a coincidence though. They only care about 'democracy' and 'human rights.'
The US is slowly waking up to the reality that they are not as powerful as they used to believe:
- Russia's nuclear arsenal is now definitely newer and harder to defend against. Dreams about the missile shield can be forgotten.
- In conventional arms Russia is catching up quickly. They have learned from everything the US brought to the battle field in Ukraine and they can now match it and field something better against it. At the beginning of the conflict the combination of its satellites, Himars artillery, Starlink internet and drones gave Ukraine a big advantage. No longer...
I bet quite a few strategists in the US would like it to stop its foreign adventures and fix the problems of its army instead: more and better drones, more production capacity and weapons that are less vulnerable.
In the meantime the Europeans are living in the past. They still see the US as the unbeatable superpower and it is beyond their imagination that Russia might win in Ukraine. The US might lose in Vietnam or Afghanistan where the adversary was a guerrilla supported by a hostile population. But in a high tech war? Impossible!
The Russians are less keen on war or at war than all are led to believe. Ukraine isn’t Western, they started a war without an Air Force, and are clearly not sovereign over their own fate in any case or they would have made peace with Honor in 22. To judge America and the West by the performance of Ukraine is a mistake. The Russians know that…
The Kremlin cannot replace the Russian population via mass migration. Nor does it want to. It will accept casualties, but must limit them ruthlessly. Putin's reserve, his caution, has been extraordinary.
American real strength is an unknown quantity. The true extent of its armouries is a state secret. So too the capacity of weapons systems in development.
Given the stakes and the intrinsic uncertainty of accurately comparing combat reliability both Russua and the US have every possible reason to compromise. Regardless of the effects on Europe.
We do, unfortunately America can’t be negotiated with… if Russia had even ONE American family as Agents they could have told them that.
Any American can tell you our government is a bewildering maze of Vogons , so bewildering the Vogons barely remember where that or this is…
Any American could have told them “There’s no one to talk to.”
You can and people do make a living as Health Care System Navigators at the local level, either for charity or pay, keeping Granny from being bankrupted by the impersonal blind eyes and many maws of the state.
Because we pay for end of life care in America by taking the House at the end. Medicare pays $90,000. Then Medicaid, which requires assets of less than $16,000 to qualify, the dying sign over the house. However an experienced person can guide granny or the caregivers around, to avoid bankruptcy as the last kick into the dying corpse. I don’t guess this, I didn’t read it on the internet, I found out and did something small and local about it… now… as do local charities.
Oh and yes of course it’s legal for the Medicaid system to take your house (once you’re dead) Clinton signed that into law in 1996.
See? There’s no one to talk to.
What you do is go on a quest through the maze. A clue here, a hint there, a look, a look away…
Sounds pretty cold. Just had a stint in hospital myself...no out of pocket expenses except a very modest bill for the pharmaceuticals that I got on discharge. Everything paid for by our version of public health (Medicare) plus private insurance (have been covered by that since conception). Even the food was pretty good. All run on sweated labour from the Global Majority.
That's the sort of socialism that works very nicely regardless of the rw rhetoric.
Predation upon the aged thrives here in Australia but the legal people lead the way on that one. The old are press ganged into captivity by the guardianship tribunals who have a statutory responsibility to protect the interests of their charges. The rules, procedures and byways of that system are chilling. The fees for writing a cheque or stapling some papers would frighten anyone.
Years ago my late mother almost got mauled by her prospective 'guardians'. At the hearing (no lawyers for the individual involved are allowed) I managed to act as a de facto barrister and the sharks swam away...it was too much trouble. Vulnerable people have no hope dealing with idealists. None.
Bukele's idea of fiscal spending was to enact a bitcoin scheme.
Any central or south American leader who attempts to help the poor is branded a leftist and driven out of power. So ideologically motivated policies keep the region as it is.
From what I can gather the bitcoin scheme has costed around $100 million. This is less than 2% of the Salvadorean budget for 2021, and it's not a yearly expense.
I would consider that a reckless waste of money for 2021, if we assume the scheme is not going to succeed. But it's far from fiscally unsustainable.
Canada spends less than 2% of GDP on its military. A one off investment in Bitcoin was Bukele's idea of fiscal. This is irrelevant. Maybe his focus should be on the 98% that is spent year after year.
I consider Bitcoin to be a reckless waste of energy. It's a speculative instrument.
There are alternatives to Bitcoin that don't cost energy in terms of mining, but they didn't attract the attention of Bukele. Not shiny enough, I suppose.
Hit the like button at the top or bottom of this page to like this entry. Use the share and/or re-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so.
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I'll take Bukele over "Our Democracy" any day of the week.
Bukele is going after dangerous criminals.
The "Our Democracy" Regime ARE the dangerous criminals.
Did Bukele suspend elections?
He attacked due process, yet the judiciary in El Salvador is described as corrupt, so it was already under attack from within.
You know what's a real drag on my civil liberties?
Dying.
something to think about
Perhaps we’re being glib about it… but it’s true.
There’s gotta be a balance.
Alas, let us ponder Psalms 2:1-6.
To give the critic of Bukele his due, the policies he's pursuing are remedial, akin to a father who can only restore of the family he failed to discipline be harsh beatings of violent and manipulative sons. I understand that he must circumvent the corrupt judiciary, as it has become a de facto arm of the gangs, but the policies Bukele pursues are the groundwork for a coercive government unaccountable to their people. I am not saying that he shouldn't pursue these policies--El Salvador is really in a state of emergency--but these solutions are indicative of a deeper disease. I think an ordered hierarchy of power is necessary to prevent a society from making the tradeoffs (unaccountable gov't control vs. violent gang control) that Bukele makes. Only when there are tiered, non-central nodes of power (think Charlemagne, his lords below him, and the lords below them) that have real authority and real coercive force do you find a third option between a powerful state and chaos in the streets.
As a note, I know that Bukele is crushing it in the polls. I am not saying that he is not popular or unqualifiedly unpopular; I am simply saying that the groundwork he is laying can used to circumvent any accountability.
Given that Bukele is attempting to woo network state elite human capital and all, I'm not sure democratic accountability is particularly important. (Rule of law around property would be though.)
“Our Democracy” ©️ and Civil Liberties INC did and continue to do a Helluva job circumventing accountability… which one could say are elections…
So the regime(s) are putting the woke away, as AA predicted. But it's no time to be sanguine. There's a lot of work to do to just get back to normal a la the 90s, never mind a society with morals. I share your view of the Grateful Dead. I am a young Boomer. I missed all the 60s nonsense (thank God!) and frankly thought their music was kind of boring. My rebellion was punk rock in the late 70s.
I don't see Canada or the USA putting woke away any time soon.
Yes, it's too integral to the power structure which dominates all permanent institutions of relevance
I am referring to the Academic Agent's bet with Auron MacIntyre, which he describes in an article here: Putting the Woke Away https://open.substack.com/pub/forbiddentexts/p/putting-the-woke-away?r=3tzk2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web and gives several examples of what he means by it. It important to note that this is containment to get conservatives back into the fold of the regime, not a strategic defeat.
A defeat? By the conservatives?
That’s a dog catching a 747 at cruising altitude…
Reminds me of the Thomas Sowell quote: "There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs."
El Salvadorians appear to like the trade-offs, preferring public safety.
Not surprising; I doubt most of the people who read the Economist would maintain their idealism if their own neighborhoods hit the murder rate of pre-Bukele El Salvador
global elites . . let's not go there. Already done.
Yes. And aren't there just going to have to be some seriously hard trade-offs (big style) coming down the line in the years ahead.... now that our poisonous woke intelligentsia has unglued everything that held our democratic liberalism together. As I wrote about in this piece: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Adults understand this. Adolescents and ideologues (but I repeat myself) do not.
Hey Niccolo. What's your take the expected retaliation by Iran? How do you view constant headlines like "US asks Iran not to escalate.", "Iran to retaliate in calibrated manner "?
Good timing in asking me this question!
I am writing something about this rn.
Looking forward to it! I ask because I suspect you'll agree that it feels kind of performative to telegraph a supposedly effective retaliation for days on the news. I wonder how you read this in the context of turbo-america.
Good old Vonnegut, right again.
If democracy is so good, why does it come with so many problems: corrupt judges, self-serving politicians, double standards, election fraud, usurpation of power, vague, ambiguous laws, continuous growth of government, disparity of income, elites, oligarchs, politicalization of everything, ever increasing taxes, political parties, over-regulation, government-corporate-media collusion, unresponsiveness to popular wants & needs, secrecy, surveillance, censorship, . . . . . .
What is democracy and what is statism?
Why can’t we do better?
Because we want MOAR and MOAR -and someone else to pay.
Because we voted and will again the same way, until it ends.
More
To be fair, all of those are problems of every political structure. Democracy helps mitigate some aspects, but it is no panacea.
Democracy Diversifies The People’s Portfolios of Vices.
Diversifying is our strength.
Just as spreading cancer weakens it, allowing it to be safely exhaled. 🧐
Granted, we’re seeing an Erosion of some of our positions… 😂
Perhaps a Hedging Strategy is in order… 😂
The "democracy" as export commodity model trotted out by neocons and their leftist counterparts is incoherent in the context of both practice and meaning. Genuine democracy requires extremely specific conditions to develop and persist without which its sudden attempted imposition produces mass misery (e.g. Libya, Syria, Iraq - compare average living standards and religious freedom before and after). The definition of "democracy" also shifts depending upon the goals of the imposing hegemon (this has not been lost on African countries which is one of the reasons China is prevailing over Western powers with little costs). Note that the Economist/neocon crowd also has a distaste for Kagame, a military genius who stopped a genocide (note that there were no Western interventions to impose "democracy" during the genocide) and engineered an economic miracle in a country without significant resources.
Democracy means the people rule. There’s exactly one problem with democracy…
…. People.
Oh you could take your laundry list of pejoratives and put VOTERS after every single one.
Corrupt ✅
Double dealing ✅
Fraud✅
I can go on. ✅
People are not interchangeable. Self-government under the rule of law evolved only in a handful of specific conditions in a few, fairly atypical, societies. And the peaceful change of government was pioneered by tiny, cohesive, elites prepared to forego the thrills of revenge and rapine for the assurance of private property and due process. Expecting the Global Majority to reproduce the instincts and behaviours of Whig England is fatuous. Cheering on the Global Majority at their worst (South Africa or Gaza) as so many do is the height of insanity.
I dread what is going to unfold in North America and elsewhere across the West.
Well, it's not like the previous administration was super accountable. Assuming they could achieve accountability in the first place is the issue. For some places and peoples, a Bukele is the best you can hope for.
My biggest problem with Bukele is the question what his long term vision is. The longer you keep people in prison the less suitable they are for the labor market and the more embedded they will be in the criminal mindset. Remember that Bukele throws the net very wide: many of those arrested are not (yet) criminals.
A second problem is that the lawlessness that the police can now indulge in tends to contaminate the rest of society. If you have a property dispute with your neighbor and he has a brother with the police you have a good chance to become one of the 77000.
I see this kind of policies as the criminal equivalent of "get rich quickly". We have seen many of them before and in the end they were all found to cause much more harm then they solved: three-strikes-out, broken-windows, zero tolerance for soft drugs, etc.
What's your solution? In India they have a caste system. The pressure is off to excel. It's great because of this. Less talented people are happier. The West's endless need to be a winner by hook or by crook doesn't work, in my humble opinion. True, the occasional diamond in the rough cannot move upward but in general there is little criminal behavior in a very poor country.
My solution would be to go Rodrigo and erase the 77,000 scumbags from the face of the earth. As of now they’re a massive jailbreak / insurrection waiting to happen - only a matter of time.
The Economist, a journal I subscribed to for most of 30 years, has become another victim of the globalist takeover. To be pitied more than reviled.
Lol. Kill them, or keep them in prison forever.
As far as the criminal mindset… you don’t know any it seems.
Just wait until middle America gets a taste of what Biden's illegals are capable of. The apologetics of white liberalism will be tested against the appetites of the Global Majority.
Well they are…
Middle America is so full of 💩 their very breathe could fertilize the Sinai.
“Hate has no place here …”
..,. Meanwhile, Mommy sits on the school board and daddy will sit on the zoning board and keep the “Canadians” out. That’s how mittel bourgeois America says “Niggers” for those of you who don’t understand our WI PIPO Cant. Yes. We have our own linga franca …
As far as the illegals, as the Spanish are like the Italians and don’t kill without a reason, and kill among their own, not so unpopular. Unless it costs money, in which case Karen-Frauer will do them in… locally.
All politics really is local!
French anti-wokeness crossing political lines reminds me of what you said about Lubic on Alex's show
Those of us on the right should not take the French "fight" against wokeness too seriously. It’s just two siblings fighting, so there won't be any changes to the underlying Enlightenement based paradigms that created both the American woke and French laicite liberalism. It's almost like the Sunnis and Shias fighting it out in some God forsaken Middle Eastern country. Does it really matter to other religious minorities, which side wins? So it goes with the French "war" on wokeness.
I think you're misrepresenting the concept of anarchotyranny somewhat...as coined by Sam Francis the tyranny part doesn't refer to an eventual law and order backlash of the Bukele type, but rather to the repression by supposedly liberal states against people objecting to the anarcho part in the term (e. g. mass illegal immigration which is enabled through deliberate non-enforcement of laws, disproportionate crime rates of certain demographics enabled by lax punishment even for violent crimes, while hate speech legislation is steadily expanded).
This dynamic is also a crucial part of the rise of AfD's support in Germany btw. The foreign policy stuff, alleged pro-Russian sentiment etc. is much less important.
That was my thought as well, thank you for saving me the trouble of looking up the source :) the problem of the state allowing anarchy to reign such that the people need protecting, while only protecting the interests of the government and enforcing laws against law abiding citizens is the current MO of western tyranny. The recent FISA madness in the USA is a prime example.
Maybe I worded it clumsily, as it wasn't my intention to define it as you appear to have to read it.
Correct
Regarding El Salvador:
Transnationalist NGOs like Amnesty International and neoliberal outlets like the Economist sure do have a weird affinity for extortionist thugs. I'm certain that's just a coincidence though. They only care about 'democracy' and 'human rights.'
The US is slowly waking up to the reality that they are not as powerful as they used to believe:
- Russia's nuclear arsenal is now definitely newer and harder to defend against. Dreams about the missile shield can be forgotten.
- In conventional arms Russia is catching up quickly. They have learned from everything the US brought to the battle field in Ukraine and they can now match it and field something better against it. At the beginning of the conflict the combination of its satellites, Himars artillery, Starlink internet and drones gave Ukraine a big advantage. No longer...
I bet quite a few strategists in the US would like it to stop its foreign adventures and fix the problems of its army instead: more and better drones, more production capacity and weapons that are less vulnerable.
In the meantime the Europeans are living in the past. They still see the US as the unbeatable superpower and it is beyond their imagination that Russia might win in Ukraine. The US might lose in Vietnam or Afghanistan where the adversary was a guerrilla supported by a hostile population. But in a high tech war? Impossible!
The Russians are less keen on war or at war than all are led to believe. Ukraine isn’t Western, they started a war without an Air Force, and are clearly not sovereign over their own fate in any case or they would have made peace with Honor in 22. To judge America and the West by the performance of Ukraine is a mistake. The Russians know that…
The Kremlin cannot replace the Russian population via mass migration. Nor does it want to. It will accept casualties, but must limit them ruthlessly. Putin's reserve, his caution, has been extraordinary.
American real strength is an unknown quantity. The true extent of its armouries is a state secret. So too the capacity of weapons systems in development.
Given the stakes and the intrinsic uncertainty of accurately comparing combat reliability both Russua and the US have every possible reason to compromise. Regardless of the effects on Europe.
We do, unfortunately America can’t be negotiated with… if Russia had even ONE American family as Agents they could have told them that.
Any American can tell you our government is a bewildering maze of Vogons , so bewildering the Vogons barely remember where that or this is…
Any American could have told them “There’s no one to talk to.”
You can and people do make a living as Health Care System Navigators at the local level, either for charity or pay, keeping Granny from being bankrupted by the impersonal blind eyes and many maws of the state.
Because we pay for end of life care in America by taking the House at the end. Medicare pays $90,000. Then Medicaid, which requires assets of less than $16,000 to qualify, the dying sign over the house. However an experienced person can guide granny or the caregivers around, to avoid bankruptcy as the last kick into the dying corpse. I don’t guess this, I didn’t read it on the internet, I found out and did something small and local about it… now… as do local charities.
Oh and yes of course it’s legal for the Medicaid system to take your house (once you’re dead) Clinton signed that into law in 1996.
See? There’s no one to talk to.
What you do is go on a quest through the maze. A clue here, a hint there, a look, a look away…
That’s American government.
Sounds pretty cold. Just had a stint in hospital myself...no out of pocket expenses except a very modest bill for the pharmaceuticals that I got on discharge. Everything paid for by our version of public health (Medicare) plus private insurance (have been covered by that since conception). Even the food was pretty good. All run on sweated labour from the Global Majority.
That's the sort of socialism that works very nicely regardless of the rw rhetoric.
Predation upon the aged thrives here in Australia but the legal people lead the way on that one. The old are press ganged into captivity by the guardianship tribunals who have a statutory responsibility to protect the interests of their charges. The rules, procedures and byways of that system are chilling. The fees for writing a cheque or stapling some papers would frighten anyone.
Years ago my late mother almost got mauled by her prospective 'guardians'. At the hearing (no lawyers for the individual involved are allowed) I managed to act as a de facto barrister and the sharks swam away...it was too much trouble. Vulnerable people have no hope dealing with idealists. None.
This is why families and men exist
Hence the Coldest War of all...the one waged by the state against traditional families and gender roles.
Short answer; Americans don’t have a government that can be negotiated…
We can’t. We get around it or travel through a maze.
Bukele's policy cannot work in the long run because El Salvador is a desperately impoverished country. Cures aren't found by addressing symptoms.
That's true, but you still have to stop the bleeding before treating the underlying cause or your patient's just going to bleed out
In the short term, stop the bleeding. But what's the long term plan?
El Salvador used to be known for its death squads.
"But what's the long term plan?"
Caste system or traditional Christianity.
They're Roman Catholic, with Patron Saints.
Works, just needed a Palestinian Falangist updated for BTC 😂
I don't see why not. What makes you say that? Is it a fiscal issue (cost)?
Bukele's idea of fiscal spending was to enact a bitcoin scheme.
Any central or south American leader who attempts to help the poor is branded a leftist and driven out of power. So ideologically motivated policies keep the region as it is.
From what I can gather the bitcoin scheme has costed around $100 million. This is less than 2% of the Salvadorean budget for 2021, and it's not a yearly expense.
I would consider that a reckless waste of money for 2021, if we assume the scheme is not going to succeed. But it's far from fiscally unsustainable.
Canada spends less than 2% of GDP on its military. A one off investment in Bitcoin was Bukele's idea of fiscal. This is irrelevant. Maybe his focus should be on the 98% that is spent year after year.
I consider Bitcoin to be a reckless waste of energy. It's a speculative instrument.
There are alternatives to Bitcoin that don't cost energy in terms of mining, but they didn't attract the attention of Bukele. Not shiny enough, I suppose.