Запитання: What does the US have to gain by other countries not being authoritarian?
With the current situation in Venezuela, it seems like the US is once again weighing in against a leader that is textbook socialist or communist that is also a dictator. I understand the hardships that dictators in these situations often do and why, from a humanitarian point of view, we should want to hope for a free and capitalist Venezuela. However, I am wondering, from a USA first point of view, why we would want that. With socialism making countries less competitive on a world stage, wouldn’t that be good for our economy, due to the fact we are more competitive relative to them? Again this is not a point of view I take, but I would love to hear a USA-first philosophy that suggests we should intervene and spend money.
Моя відповідь:
Being a Socialist state is not a crime by itself. There are plenty of countries in today's world that can be called more or less socialist: consider Nordic model, informally known as Swedish Socialism.
Dictatorships, on the other hand, tend to build Socialist or Communist economies because the Socialism assumes a bigger fraction of the nation's means of production and gross domestic product controlled and redistributed by the ruling regime. See, for example, Lenin: „The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat“ (1919).
Simply speaking, it is easier to rule over the poor than the rich; it easier to be a dictator if your economic system is a Communism.
The biggest concern is that dictatorships — Communist dictatorships — also commit other crimes against human rights and international law, which is seen intolerable by the US:
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