All Rights Reserved. Today, globalization and the end of the Cold War have torn down walls of all kinds around the world. In the Cold War era, inefficient and corrupt regimes were subsidized by the United States and the Soviet Union, merely because they were allies. Today, capital and human talent move around the world quickly and easily.
Nobody is interested in subsidizing someone else's folly or evil.
There are new questions to ask, Friedman notes. These are relevant questions because, in many ways, Puerto Rico is like one of those countries that was subsidized during the Cold War but found that the flow of money, arms, food, technical expertise or whatever else it was it needed had been cut off when that old system died. The resemblance is there because Puerto Rico continues to be subsidized, in the sense that it sees a net inflow of funds from the United States. And while that flow is unlikely to be abruptly cut to zero, Congress showed with the repeal of Section 936 tax credits just how easy it is to trim it. The answers are not encouraging.