Falx wrote:The Irish potato famine killed people and its heart was a simple economical problem. Potatoes were more expensive in England than Ireland so it made sense to export and starve the population.
The Irish potato famine happened because of a LACK of capitalism. Catholic peasants were not allowed to own land as there was a requirement to convert to protestantism, so they were excluded from the capitalist system. Also, there were severe restrictions on free trade, including what were called the Corn Laws and the Navigation Laws.
Also, the Irish peasants who starved were growing the potatoes themselves, for their own use, so they would not have sold them in England, unless they could have gotten money for them to buy other food.
So far, the socialists and communists have claimed that capitalism has killed more people than communism, but they have not substantiated their claim, except for this mention of the Irish potato famine.
As far as Pinochet, only a couple thousand people died in Chile in the civil war that followed the coup against Allende. That is a pretty low number as civil wars go, and nothing compared even to the
firing squads in Cuba under Ernesto "El Che" Guevara and Fidel Castro.
You might bring up the famines in India, but they didn't have free trade there. The British followed a policy of "divide and rule", giving local rajas a lot of power over small territories. They imposed a patchwork of different laws, making trade between these territories difficult. Some of them even imposed Sharia law in the more Moslem areas. Then there were very high taxes under Warren Hastings, confiscation of boats used in shipping for military purposes, an end to shipments from Japanese occupied Burma, and so forth. Hardly laissez-faire capitalism.
We are now living the in future that economists warned Keynes about, but he dismissed with "In the long run we are all dead."
"The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment."
Mises - Human Action, p. 562; p. 564