-- On 13 Jan 2002, at 8:44, mattd wrote:
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina Rioters ransacked banks, destroyed ATM machines and set fires across downtown Buenos Aires early Friday after a night of street protests against a government freeze on bank deposits turned violent. MORE http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=02/01/11/11 07123
mattd and all the other pinkos and commies think this is the second coming of the communist revolution. In actual fact what happened is the umpteenth Argentinian president in the last couple of weeks issued a ringing denunciation of capitalism, and then told the Argentinians that in order to save them from capitalism, he was going to confiscate their dollars and replace them with nonconvertible pesos. When the Argentinians understood just how they were going to be protected from the evils of capitalism, their enthusiasm for these measures diminished considerably. As we speak, while the Argentinian government is implementing all sorts of half assed socialist measures, the Argentinian public, whatever their views on politics in theory, are as individuals implementing the most radical free market cure for their problems: Dollarization. The situation in Argentina is akin to the situation in the Soviet Union shortly before the fall, in that socialism is being dismantled in practice without regard to government policy. If, as seems likely, the Argentinian economy makes an unplanned and prohibited coversion from pesos to dollars, in defiance of government policy, the likely result is that the value of the peso will drop to zero. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG I7uV/JnkjCwZytnj7iHcGqMDwQeY7uHWfoDaFMnn 4fqVFnRWK2V+eqPMRf4duPT1Ywq7Jw4uesCJFkv7w