[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

We aren't going to solve our immigration problem. The solution is in Mexico and the rest of Latin America homegrowing a middle class. They need to lose the culture of corruption that is pretty much the retirement plan for minor officialdom -- I've no clear idea how many times this multiplies, in effect, the tax burden on the people and their economy, but multiply it it clearly does. They need to secure property rights from rapaciousness public or private, and they're not too good at that yet,

I agree with a lot of this except the anti-socialization part but do you think the US has anything to do with this?

witness Chavez's antics in Venezuela. He'll buy them a depression yet before he's ousted.

Besides the dip in the early 2000's, Chavez has done decently well for Venezuela. They are in a slow but steady rise since the dip, which mainly had to do with oil prices.

Originally Posted by xoxoxbruce

It is NOT, however, our job to change things there, because it will just bite us in the ass again, as it has everywhere else.

I wouldn't say that. Just because all of our modern way of changing things in other countries has bitten us in the ass doesn't mean that if we do it right, it can't perform miracles. The biggest problem we've had is that we try to force other countries to our way of thinking and do to take matters into our own hands.

We can't forget how well the Marshall Plan did for European countries after WWII. There are ways of helping countries get out of poverty, but we just haven't been exercising them lately.