Down this rhetorical road lies Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Let's pray the voters and legislative branch of New Zealand are able to temper PM Ardern's flights of fancy.
Good? Bad? I dunno but you're in 'culture' territory here so be careful with your comments - NZers live on a giant farm and we have hungry kids underperforming in schools/employment and our beautiful rivers chock full of literal crap. Lot's of Kiwis are very unhappy about _any_ system that thinks this is an acceptable tradeoff for unevenly distributed $$.
Or let's maybe not.
Cuba could, and did, trade with essentially every other nation on the planet, so blaming "U.S. sanctions" is not a realistic excuse for their failure.
And? 56% of Venezuelans voted for Hugo Chavez.
The only "flight of fancy" here is that Marxism can somehow ever be made to work. One would think that a hundred million dead bodies piled up over the last century would be enough to constitute persuasive evidence, but True Believers gonna believe, I guess.
Settle down with the extremes.
Try this instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company#Nati...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#Banana_ma...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
There's a lot more where that came from.
That's not a hundred million. Not by orders of magnitude.
There is no "other side of the story" here.
Economic policies form a spectrum of trade-offs, balancing needs and priorities of different socioeconomic groups and legal entities.
It seems to me that people are either (a) brainwashed into thinking that way so that they accept massive inequality as the inevitable cost of avoiding economic collapse and misery, or (b) using such an argument disingenuously to support their own advantage or emotional attachment to a particular worldview.
Whatever the reason, it makes the speaker look silly and stifles serious debate.
The real question is “how do we make things better?” The free market policies of the last few decades have made plenty of things worse. Let’s try to improve the state of some of those things.
Capitalism doesn’t imply lack of a social safety net or regulations. Even its most classic proponent Adam Smith saw a role for the state in providing public goods and regulating industry.
The trick is to balance capitalism and socialism, as in a social democracy.
Of course that's not the inevitable alternative, but if you have no understanding of what capitalism is and is not, as seems to be the case with Ms. Arden (and 95% of the rest of the people on this planet), that's where you can end up before you know it.