Reply #72: Investment Biker

[Squeech]

Cool title, huh? Sucks you right in...

It purports to be non-fiction. The story is, Jim Rogers, the author, was a Wall Street hotshot in the '80s. Having made his millions and lost interest in the unalloyed pursuit of dollars, he decided what he really wanted to do is ride his motorcycle around the world.

So far I've read where he rode across Eurasia and back. He went east via the Silk Road, and then came back through Siberia (which doesn't have a lot of good roads; for the most trackless of the wasteland he had to cheat and ride on the Trans-Siberian Railroad). The part I'm reading now is down the length of Africa. He has just had to bribe a couple of corrupt cops in Zaire.

The slice-of-life reportage is fascinating, but it's interspersed with kneejerk Republican memes about how socialism always screws up an economy and no polity can succeed unless and until it establishes a laissez-faire capitalism. He interprets his Zaire experience as the lingering aftereffects of their dalliance with the Soviet Union (even though he admits that Mobutu just wanted the aid money), when the real answer is obviously just simple corruption, which happens in all sorts of systems, from Zaire to China to Florida.

But I'm pressing on. I really want to read the South America chapter.