Anthony checks in with something he picked up from Gary North, and I recommend www.garynorth.com to one and all. The topic is the black market, France division, and what the powers that be know about who in France is called débrouillard. (An incidently, my daughter, fresh back from Paris, told me about sojourning into an alternate space, which turns out to the the lair of precisely these débrouillards.)
Some quotes:
System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call themdébrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of "l'economie de la débrouillardise." Or, sweetened for street use, "Systeme D."And...
Schneider presents his numbers as a percentage of the total market value of goods and services made in each country that same year -- each nation's gross domestic product. His data show that System D is on the rise. In the developing world, it's been increasing every year since the 1990s, and in many countries it's growing faster than the officially recognized gross domestic product (GDP). If you apply his percentages (Schneider's most recent report, published in 2006, uses economic data from 2003) to the World Bank's GDP estimates, it's possible to make a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the approximate value of the billions of underground transactions around the world. And it comes to this: The total value of System D as a global phenomenon is close to $10 trillion. Which makes for another astonishing revelation. If System D were an independent nation, united in a single political structure -- call it the United Street Sellers Republic (USSR) or, perhaps, Bazaaristan -- it would be an economic superpower, the second-largest economy in the world (the United States, with a GDP of $14 trillion, is numero uno). The gap is narrowing, though, and if the United States doesn't snap out of its current funk, the USSR/Bazaaristan could conceivably catch it sometime this century.The comments lament that these people do not honor intellectual property rights, apparently unaware that IPR is recent and western. It does so distress one that the natives do not subscribe to a system that makes no sense and harms progress! The next complaint is there are no regulations. USA economy is heavily regulated. And a mess. What this shows is an alternative to the rich/poor dichotomy, that we do not need regulations, or IPR, or NGOs or foreign aid. Just stop crushing people.
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