> Do you think the Russian government should subsidize exports even if
> they have no money to pay salary and soldiers' pay?
But they *do* have the money to pay salaries. It's just that a tiny oligarchic elite is stealing everything that the country produces and sending oil and gas revenues abroad to Swiss banks accounts instead of reinvesting in local industry. Russia in 1998 has the purest, most unalloyed form of free market capitalism you can find in the world today; money can buy anything and everything -- power, industries, politicians, you name it. And the result has been an unmitigated economic and social disaster.
If the free market is so rational and perfect, why is the Chinese mainland bailing out the Hong Kong stock market? Why is free market, capitalist Brazil in such a mess? Why is socialistic China growing faster than free market India? Why, in short, are the 4 billion human beings who live under free market regimes worldwide poor as dirt? After all, the IMF has been sponsoring hideously austere, pro-free market structural adjustment programs and market-crazed deregulation schemes in the Third World for 25 years now. Where's the payoff?
-- Dennis