I guess it's a question of what change you push for. Imagine you go to post-revolution Haiti, and you just try to push for economic growth. You recognize that the country has an internationally competitive sugar industry. So you work out ways to convince everybody to go back and work on the sugar plantations, producing sugar for export. Except, you're in competition with the slave plantations, so you can't really pay people good wages or have good conditions. People don't like that, so they revolt, and you repress them with force. Before long, you have produced something like pre-revolution Haiti.
Sometimes it's important to recognize the history in order to push in the right direction. I don't know what the right direction is, but I think saying that Africans just suck because they've been dealt an awful hand seems unfair. I figure it's just really hard to get out from under the feet of an international system that was built for and by colonizers, and there are very few clearly good choices about how to do it.
I think the only country you've mentioned that's a) not a city state and b) run by the colonized people, not the colonizers, is Ireland. If you look around the world, there's a pretty strong correlation between length of colonial subjugation, and the misfortunes of the people who were colonized today. I mean, in the USA, it was a colony for a long time, and there are hardly any Native Americans left, and those that survived live in the worst parts of the country, generally in poverty. The same is basically true of Canada, or Australia.
Countries like Japan, never colonized, or China, only briefly and partially colonized, seem to recover way faster. I also don't think it's specifically an African thing: look at the Phillipines, or Pakistan, or large parts of the ME.
Isn't it a bit a matter of culture, though? Colonial administrations are built to extract wealth from a country. So, when you get independence, that's still what the government, hell, even the infrastructure, is built for. Half the rail lines go straight to a port, all the bureaucrats know is how to squeeze people. So you end up with 'bad governance', even decades later, because that's the culture of governance that gets passed on, generation to generation.
I always got the feeling that asians of that generation (at least at the leadership level) understood that the Japanese were just playing by the rules of the game established by the europeans. That's why both sides of the chinese civil war, for instance, were willing to work with the japanese - and why after the communists won, they were happy to work with the japanese to rebuild the economy. It's the same in South Korea - the post-war leadership's relationship to Japan is somewhat complex - consider Syngman Rhee, who was part of the Gapsin coup, or to a more extreme level, Park Chung-hee, or Chiang Kai-shek, both of whom had formative years in Japanese institutions, and were soldiers in the japanese army.
I'm not sure. I was just looking for some points of comparison, and as far as I can gather, tampon tax (the standout example for regressive luxury taxation) wasn't actually a luxury tax, but rather a tax on 'unnecessary' items. Which is - ech - but, you know, it's not an extra tax.
I think explicit taxes on higher-price items within categories (so like, expensive cars) would be kinda nice, because it avoids all of the fiddly questions over what is and isn't an luxury item.
I think in general luxury goods taxes are underexploited. People normally want to buy expensive things so they can show off how much money they have. May as well make them more expensive, and divert some of that cash to useful purposes.
Communism is basically orthogonal to the whole free market thing, though. Capitalism is defined as a system in which you can pay somebody a wage that's less than what you get from selling the products of their labour. Other than some basically technocratic stuff (how do you make sure workers are properly compensated) there's no specific communist problem with free markets I can think of. There's also no shortage of capitalist nations that were extremely anti free markets.
It's at least somewhat coincidence that communists have typically gone for high state involvement - Russia was, before it was communist, basically an entirely non-free market, and most industry happened at the behest of the Tsarist bureacracy, which was massive. So the USSR was big on state planning kind of as a continuation of that.
I think gentrification is simply a vague way to put a face on something people don't like: because of fluctuating wages and rents, people are often forced to leave their communities and homes. People notice the gentrification side of it, because it involves a lot of large and imposing buildings, visible cultural artefacts, etc - and they notice the most extreme examples of it - refugees, etc. There's no clear discourse about the vast middle ground, which is much more ambiguous but also much more impactful - that because the right to live in a place is subject to market forces, and because availability of work moves, it's vanishingly unlikely that any but the richest will be able to live in a stable geographical community for more than a handful of years.
>any increase in productivity is bad because it reduces labor scarcity
Isn't it? Increases in productivity, normally called automation, must reduce labour scarcity unless demand for the product is proportionately increased. There are plenty of sectors where this is exactly what happens, and some where it isn't.
Sometimes it's important to recognize the history in order to push in the right direction. I don't know what the right direction is, but I think saying that Africans just suck because they've been dealt an awful hand seems unfair. I figure it's just really hard to get out from under the feet of an international system that was built for and by colonizers, and there are very few clearly good choices about how to do it.