As an argentinean citizen I believe that corruption and crime are what impede prosperity. How can prosperity arise when power is in the hands of corrupts?
Welfare is a method of fighting corruption though. Corruption means taking money from the public. Welfare is giving money to the public.
But when the ones in power are corrupt, they are the same people who would have to implement the welfare. And of course they steal a big percentage of the welfare money. And also inflation. Look at inflation numbers in Argentina. Look what "giving money to the public" can do. Don't be blind to the consequences of economically unsound intentions of welfare.
Do you think the West earned its prosperity through hard work? Fossil fuels and colonization built their civilizations, not them. Humans are no more genius than they were a millenia ago. They just accessed a new free energy source, which is soon to deplete, taking the civilization it built with it, into a horrible famine.
It's an unrealistic reduction to talk about "The West" as if it was an homogeneous entity. The whole world used fossil fuels, and you should read the history of the big nations of the East too.
What's your point? Are you defending Argentina's corrupt politicians?
Has that hypothesis been tested against other nations that developed prosperity? How was their corruption through my the process?
Well that doesn't seem true on the world stage. I mean China has seen rapid GDP growth but still remains extremely corrupt. But I think you are missing the parent's point, it's not the corruption they are complaining about, it's cultural values that they think are determental to economic success. And having been to Africa (Zambia) and origionally being from a poor country in Asia myself, I think there's a lot of truth to what he's saying.
Isn't it more likely to be the way around, that societies where the people have learnt to work together, prosper?
It’s a feedback system. The only problem is that governments tend to ignore the welfare/education/prosperity part and focus entirely on austerity laws.
In Argentina it's not like that. The corrupt government has been focused in welfare for decades.