Capital and Brain Drainage: Phenomena That Goverments Usually Try To cut By Limiting Freedom

When the situation in a country is bad, people tend to remove their money or remove themselves, sending their capital abroad or emigrating; this can leave any government in the verge of collapse so, from then on there are two alternatives: Improve the situation or start cutting individual rights and freedom.

If a characterization of any communist or totalitarian regime around the world comes to mind, two things are often remembered before anything else: The bad life quality of the people and the lack of freedom. One of the aspects of liberty and individual rights that is severely curtailed is the freedom to travel at one's own will; such regimes tend to limit the ability to travel of their citizens, especially abroad, and the reason is to avoid mass emigration. Another thing that is seen is the limitation of free capital flow, but this can also be seen in democracies with severe, chronic financial and economic problems, and the reason for this is similar: to avoid a meltdown of the economy. 

Totalitarian regimes rarely can improve the quality of life of their citizens, particularly in the bracket of professionals, intellectuals and qualified workers that naturally expect higher compensations for their higher and better skills. In other words; The educated always wants more than the brute, but totalitarian leaders always base themselves on the strength of masses that are naturally less educated than what in Western culture we would identify as middle class and upper middle class workers. 

High-class people either escape the regime at its inception for fear of their lives, like the Russian nobility during the Bolshevist revolution, or abide and even collude with the new leaders, like many industrials during the Nazi regime in Germany. The middle class is always the most problematic and thus, the one that receives the worst punishment by those that want to control the situation but cannot and will not satisfy the needs of that people. They just focus on the bread and circus required to keep the most ignorant relatively happy.


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