Egypt's Real Problem

I recently found myself rethinking my Egypt post while reading this American Thinker piece here:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/02/egypts_real_problem_decades_of.html

The fact of the matter is this: Mubarak is a socialist dictator, and his ruling party espouses socialist ideology. The revolution in Egypt is a direct result of the failure of authoritarian socialist ideology and policy. For over fifty years, the ruling political clique in Egypt has espoused a home-grown form of Arab nationalist socialism.

Arab nationalism. And a socialist dictator. Combine ethnic nationalism with socialism and you get the predictable.

It's still unwise to support anti-Mubarak forces when the predictable replacement is going to be the proto-terrorist Muslim Brotherhood, but once there's some degree of stability, well, stability really is the only reason to support Mubarak anymore.

This reminded me that I have a copy of President Saddam Hussein's Address on Iraq's National Day 1983, and President Saddam Hussein's Speech on the 6th Anniversary of the Day of the Days The Great Victory Day 8 August 1994, and his roughly 50 page treatise "One Trench or Two". All are drier reads than the country they hail from, but they are about pan-Arab nationalism and the idea of central control/rulership. Basically, arab national socialism.

Sometimes you can judge a dictator book by its cover.

Richard Little at American Thinker points out the specifics with regards to Egypt and how it applies there. Broadly, national socialism and centralized control don't work anywhere. Even with cultural differences (including the basic lack of a future tense in Arabic), education level differences, and economic developmental differences, it doesn't work. It doesn't work in Europe - where the wise nations are pulling away from their road to socialism before they implode like Greece; it doesn't work in the US, where individual states like California are imploding from their own policies. It doesn't work anywhere it's tried.

Whether the central control be with a dictator or a committee of bureaucrats, it's all coercive force that works against the will of the individual - the individual who knows their own needs better than any self-appointed super-genius, tyrant or king.

Kudos to the Egyptian people for trying to shrug it off. Hopefully they don't end up replacing it with the Muslim Brotherhood - who will do the same, but with the added dictates of sharia law.