Quote Originally Posted by flyingimam
i know u r an intelligent person from your past posts. but u must notice that what u r saying is irrelevant.

lets look @ it this way, how many people from modern countries come to US illegally? and how many flee the low life of bad areas in mexico to come for the low life of the US, u see its much better for them and in their eyes

I'm from Iran, do u think Iran has a good economy in the world? or u think any part of that dictatorship works "good"?

but people from afghanistan and iraq (before and after both wars) do go there illegally because of relatively better conditions. so its relative, u dont find too many canadians illegally come to the US, because the situation does not force them to do so and even if they want to immigrate due to these very same situations legal paths are much wider for them than mexicans.

we have masked things with borrowing and keeping the spending spree alive, when borrowing stops or slows like right now, things start to look ugly and if this becomes a permanent situation i betcha we will have to switch or reform our ways.

I know "credit" is a very vital thing to businesses and individuals and without it no modern economy can sustain, but we need to make sense of things.
The reason i posted what i did was to show that wealth gaps in capitalist countries will always exist, and just because they do exist, it is silly to attempt to reform this situation because of "widespread social unrest". If we look at mere immigration numbers, the US would have to rank near or at the top in regards to total immigration (i believe over 12% of the US population are immigrants).

There might be small countries with numbers like that, but not many from the global north...

I do agree that peoples own interests determine global movement. I knew some Canadian people from Montreal who moved to Florida because of the weather and that alone.

Regardless, social unrest can be blamed on the failed drug policy more so than it can be blamed on wealth gaps. The author of that piece (Anna Tibaijuka) fails because she is viewing wealth as a zero sum game.
GoldenBoy812 Reviewed by GoldenBoy812 on . US wealth gap among world's highest US wealth gap among world's highest Thu, 23 Oct 2008 08:26:00 GMT A UN report has warned that the high rate of inequality in American cities could cause widespread social unrest and increased mortality. The annual State of the World's cities report from UN-Habitat, found that New York was the ninth most unequal city in world, the Guardian reported on Thursday. Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington, and Miami were not far behind, with rankings similar to those of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, Rating: 5