Letter writer Lloyd Doughty (“Don’t adopt socialist system that other nations have rejected,” Nov. 5) has made a rash estimation of Eastern European economies based on their self-promoting tours. The truth is that the economy of Hungary has been sputtering for some time, while Slovenia is another kleptocracy buoyed significantly by organized crime.
Hungary is increasingly dominated by the far-right Jobbik Party, which is openly financed by Putin’s Russia. Hungary is fast becoming another Eastern European society utterly dominated by a handful of wealthy oligarchs, just like Russian, Ukraine and Poland.
The nations that split apart from Yugoslavia during the “color” revolutions have indeed produced a lively bunch of young, English-speaking programmers, who have set up bot farms by the thousands. These farms promote scams, post fake news and gain most of their revenue selling our personal data to Google AdSense. This is the same economic activity that has Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook sweating under the intense scrutiny of Senate subcommittees.
If these are the sorts of kleptocracies Mr. Doughty sees as capitalist utopias, give me the same universal health care all of them enjoy, but leave me out of the rest.
John M. Flagler
Alfred
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