Re: Government: a good idea, or not?

On 2006-03-16, Timothy Travis <qspirit@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

snip

It might be also be interesting to check some indicators of well being among
the populations of these various countries and see the juxtaposition of
infant mortality and health and life expectancy and such things in relation
to the amount of wealth that passes through the various governments.

<http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2091rank.html>:-

Infant mortality rate (deaths/1,000 live births) 2005 estimates
(selected countries - see web page for full list)

[govt spending, per "Engineer"]

73 Iran 41.58 [14% of GDP; 58.83% state owned]
184 United States 6.50 [15.4% of GDP; 3.03% state owned]
196 Ireland 5.39 [14.4% of GDP; 1.9% state owned]
198 United Kingdom 5.16 [21.3% of GDP; 2.01% state owned]
204 Canada 4.75 [19.3% of GDP; 3.47% state owned]
207 Australia 4.69 [18.6% of GDP; 2.93% state owned]
215 France 4.26 [23.7% of GDP; 5.5% state owned]
224 Hong Kong 2.96 [9.9% of GDP; 1.7% state owned]

Other stats from the same CIA table:

1 Angola 187.49 (worst)
37 Pakistan 72.44
55 India 56.29
65 World 50.11 (average)
79 Egypt 32.59
103 Korea, North 24.04
102 China 24.18
108 Gaza Strip 22.93
118 West Bank 19.62
180 Israel 7.03
186 Cuba 6.33
187 Korea, South 6.28
195 Monaco 5.43
200 European Union 5.10
222 Iceland 3.31
223 Japan 3.26
225 Sweden 2.77
226 Singapore 2.29 (best)

The US govt spends a vast amount on its military activities
<http://www.cdi.org/issues/wme/spendersfy04.html> which probably doesn't
leave much for anything useful.

There
may be no correlation between the amount of money the people involved in a
certain government spent, in relation to the GDP, but there are a lot of
countries in the world with higher indicators than ours where more of the
GDP flows through the government than flows through ours. Connection?
Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps the highest per capita number of millionaires is
a better measure of the good life than the percentage of children with
health care readily available.

That would probably be Monaco - and reflects 'tax haven' policies rather
than a real economy. It's a police state with an absolute monarchy ;))

That's another one of those ideological
value judgments......

snip

Hmm; obscenely wealthy old people of questionable morality, or innocent
babies? ;))

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