It's not quite true. Mostly they steal your money and kill you and you wake up dead and broke. Kind of like getting divorced. I found this article on Cuba to be interesting because I thought all these years that they were good socialists and well landed and raising all the food they needed from within. I forgot that they were subsidized for generations by the USSR who paid for Cuban sugar cane and after its collapse from socialism, supported by Venezuela who suddenly collapsed after it was eaten alive by socialism.
When some of my family returned from a year in Norway we talked, like we do, and they told me how incredibly expensive everything is there. Not just the food but everything. It was actually more cost effective to get on the ferry in Oslo, sail to Denmark, buy a replacement coffee pot, and sail back to Norway. And Norway has the North Sea oil. What is it about oil that makes countries crazy?
At any rate, I learned one of the reasons why Norway is the way it is is because of World War II. When the cheese factory and depot in Norway burned down I thought it was amusing even as the price of cheese went sky high there. I didn't know it was because of the Norwegian experience after being scalped in World War II by food imports who then committed the nation to raising or growing all of its own food and so no, they were not going to import any cheese even if there was no cheese.
It made me recall to mind the time I took a train from Washington DC to Rhode Island during which I read Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. You don't want to be caught dead with that book anywhere near a college, university or cultural center. OTOH, none of them have ever read it so why not? Wow, if only they knew!
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