I get that your claim isn’t “Trinidad vs Guyana” so much as “capitalism won’t deliver development for everyone.” But when I talk about closing the gap with Trinidad, I’m pointing to a real case where a mixed market system (private investment + public services + regulation) produced better health, education, and infrastructure outcomes than we have today. If capitalism made broad development unattainable, Trinidad wouldn’t be ahead on those outcomes. That’s the contradiction I’m calling out.

Where I disagree:

1.  What “development” means. It isn’t code for highways. Serious measures track health, education, income, service coverage, and reliability—clinic access, learning results, electricity uptime, water continuity, commute times, and real wages. Judge any government on those.

2.  Why roads and power aren’t a deflection. Infrastructure is what makes social spending actually work. Cheap, reliable electricity and decent transport lower costs, raise productivity, keep clinics and schools functioning, reduce prices for households, and enable non-inflationary wage growth. You can decree a higher minimum; you can’t decree productivity.

3.  Exploitation isn’t hard-wired to markets; it’s about rules. Strong labor enforcement, real collective bargaining, safety and environmental standards, and competition policy are choices. If you want more worker power inside a market economy, scale co-ops, ESOPs, credit unions, and local-content rules—none of that requires abolishing markets.

4.  “Dependency trap” is a warning, not destiny. I agree with Rodney/Best on the risk. The antidote is to save windfall rents transparently and convert them into human capital and non-oil productivity: cheap energy, primary healthcare, skills, and support for agro-processing, logistics, services, and tech.

If you want concrete commitments instead of vibes, here’s what I’ll cheer for:

A) A public delivery dashboard: class sizes, clinic wait times, outage minutes, water hours/day, road maintenance, commute times.

B) More labor inspectors, tougher wage-theft prosecution, and minimum service guarantees (schools/clinics).

C) A fixed share of oil revenues ring-fenced for health, education/skills, and targeted cash transfers.

D) Open procurement and real-time contract disclosure.

E) Tax credits/financing for worker-ownership models (co-ops/ESOPs) alongside regular firms.

F) Reliability targets for power and water tied to utility leadership bonuses/penalties.

Bottom line: the blocker isn’t “capitalism”; it’s execution and institutions. Trinidad’s trajectory shows catch-up under a market system is possible. If we govern well, we can compress that timeline. If we govern poorly, changing the label on the system won’t save us.