>In order to say that there is no connection, you have to say that there is
>room in the world capitalist economy for everybody who "gets it right" to
>get rich
That's a completely different analysis. I thought we'd initially been discussing whether we're rich because they're poor, a case I think it's hard to make. Now we're shifting the emphasis to whether everyone can be rich, which is obviously not true. The U.S. plainly doesn't want competitors. Washington will happily subsidize rich cotton farmers, which fatally undermines the competitive position of African cotton farmers. They're excluded by design. But they're not toiling to make us rich - they're toiling in vain. Joan Robinson's observation, that under capitalism the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited at all, seems as true as ever.
Doug