One Last Hurrah

In our class-after-penultimate-class on Friday, each of our groups posed as nations and debated a common framework for development in conjunction with the World Bank. As a representative of the McFatherland, my positions, as well as those of my group, were steadfastly pro-trade and privatization. As such, I was pleased to see that the dominant arguments presented by all sides fell on the pro-business side. It made my job a whole lot easier. I hadn’t expected that defending the free market would be so effortless, but this class has a way of surprising me.

More important, however, was the reason why nearly everyone fell on the pro-business side. As PTJ noted at the end of class, one group tends to get thrown out of every session, usually either McDonalds or Venezuela. This is to be expected; Venezuela represents a semi-socialist system built on government regulation and popular sovereignty, while McDonalds represents complete free-market values and a transnational drive for the aggregation of capital. They represent radically different sides, while Japan, India, and the European Union present far more moderate voices. That being said, everyone eventually takes a side, and among moderates, it tends to be in line with the popular consensus at the time.

Here, I must compliment the European Union. They devised and presented a clear-cut set of economic policies, giving everyone a basis on which to work off of. To our luck, they happened to be more favorable to business growth than government assistance, and so that viewpoint was adopted by all of the other groups save Venezuela, who had no wiggle room to adapt such policies. I have no doubt that if the European Union hadn’t come down on the side of business, it would have been our group, and not Venezuela, who would have been marginalized by the rest.

So three cheers for the Dollar Menu!

And sadly, it seems that our World Politics class has come to a close. It’s been a memorable experience dictating my opinions to you all, and I shall continue to do so next semester. On behalf of all the contributors to this blog, I bid you adieu.

Thomas Cole, "The Consummation of Empire", 1835.