Egypt is Destroying Itself - YouTube

I want something like a hall of presidents but for everyone who failed to become one, just a line of all the losers. It'd be even better if they sold tomatoes that you could throw at them.

How do nations develop? How did those wretched poor countries of Western Europe multiply their wealth by a factor of 10 over 200 years?

That's the question for the ages.

You're right. You can take wealth from others through taxation and inflating the monetary supply in order to build something in the middle of nowhere that won't really do anything (just as an example). It creates jobs! And after the project has finished, then what? Nothing, if the market has no need for such trained labor. Just because government dumps money into its latest industrial policy, it doesn't follow that it is sustainable nor has "positive externalities" for the rest of society. There's also the opportunity cost. Government took all that wealth to make something with a return on investment of ????, and if all they have is 10k workers who dug in the desert to show for it, it's a waste of resources.

You'd need something more sustainable that is in tune with what people regularly demand now and in the future (consumption and investment through market prices). Government, or more specifically central planning, has been shit at providing that and predicting that for centuries. The Soviet Union made the hard case for that and lost. Only took them 70 years to learn that. The fertile ground toward what we enjoy today has been markets and from government doing the bare minimum while getting out of the way. Of course, if you're an autocrat or a dominating political party, it is hard to give away that control by letting others simply trade within a framework that upholds their property rights. (It really is a hard ask for people who are used to taking from others and doing whatever they want). Even when you get past that stage, government still lapses into a parasite. Remember that taxes in the US during the 1800s were about 10% of your income. Today it's around 50%, if you're making more than $45k.

Issues such as massive unemployment are generally due to poor public policy. The government itself is the cause, and sometimes the cure, but rarely does that work out. To be clear, it is difficult to establish institutions which uphold contracts, private property rights, and voluntary exchange. Building something in the middle of nowhere usually does nothing toward advancing to the path of prosperity. What it does do is create a bunch of people who now favor the government for its subsidy--at the very least. This is Public Choice 101. You can repeat that many times and see why second and third world countries are stuck in a rut of corruption. Those ideal institutions about property rights and voluntary exchange are a public good, which is very easily neglected by government because it is controlled by self-interested individuals with the power of the state at their hands. It's even worse than the tragedy of the commons with self-interested, profit-seeking buttholes.

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