Posted on 03/08/2002 11:43:37 AM PST by Archfiend
The scope and scale of world poverty is titanic. In fact, the majority of the world could be fairly considered desperately poor by 1st world standards.
So what do we do about it?
Some people say we should forgive the debt of third world nations. Well we certainly can do that, but you have to understand that will pretty much be the end of significant loans to third world nations. That's because the nations, banks, businesses, etc, that give out loans are doing it to make money. No money ='s no more loans.
Others say the 1st world needs to give a lot more money to poor nations. Well there are two problems with this.
First off, the overwhelming majority of poor nations are run by tinpot dictators, Islamo-fascists, or corrupt and wasteful communist regimes. So large portions of the money given to these nations goes down a rathole, into a Swiss bank account, or is used to make "El Presidente" a new palace.
The other thing to consider is that the 1st world can never give enough charity to get these nations back on their feet. To pull Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, etc, out of poverty will cost trillions of dollars EVERY YEAR because these nations can't keep their heads above water without massive foreign subsidies. There's no way that the industrialized world could, would, or should, pump that kind of money into the third world.
So what's the solution? Globalization. Introducing business capital into third world nations gives a huge boost to their local economies. Furthermore, the things that spring up around foreign businesses in third world nations like roads, airports, and reliable power and communications help bring in new business as well as helping the residents of those poor nations.
Now people who are against globalization will tell you that these people are being exploited because they're not making $10 an hour with extensive benefits like the workers in the 1st world. Well of course they're not going to make that kind of money. Going to foreign nations means dealing with language barriers, excessive transportation costs, difficulty in getting needed supplies, etc, etc. So the only reason any business would ever go to a third world country is for cheap labor or cheap materials.
Furthermore, these workers don't have guns to their heads. They work for businesses because it's the only job available or because it's a better job than they could get elsewhere. You think paying a worker 20 cents an hour is exploitation? Not if the other options are either making 5 cents an hour working for a local business or being unemployed. It's all relative to the nation you're in. That's the reality that anti-globalization protestors just can't understand.
We have to understand that charity and debt relief alone will NEVER come close to pulling poor nations out of poverty. Only free enterprise and globalization can help these nations end the cycle of endless poverty and despair that they’re trapped in.
Almost, but not quite. Civilization must go along with Globalization, that is specifically, the rule of law.
Poverty, even in the US, is not the cause of crime, but the result of crime. Either local or national.
A huge corporate investment in a third world country that stays, civily, in the middle ages , is a bad investment.
"We" do not do anything about it. It is not our collective business. Individuals, who are so minded, can and should help those in need--but surely that process should begin "at home."
There is a tremendous fallacy in this. By modern standards, the vast majority of those prosperous pioneers who built America from the ground up, were poor at one point. They did not appeal to some sort of Global entity. They climbed the ladder, as productive people have always climbed the ladder. They progressed generation by generation, passing their gains both material and spiritual on via strong families.
The idea that humanity is some sort of economic interest group that would benefit from a collectivist solution is just a super-compounding of the error that supposes that a collective in America can solve our own individual problems. And it is to this extent worse than the New Deal ever was: By its very conception, it tends to undermine our sense of who we are.
Beware of those who postulate a Humanity differentiated only by economic class or interest. They mean you no good.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Hernando de Soto just published a book on this. One fact he and his researchers came up with is that the wealth/property created by the poor in Egypt is worth 55 times the total of aid and outside investment.
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
It's become clear by now the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in most places around the globe hasn't ushered in an unequivocal flowering of capitalism in the developing and postcommunist world. Western thinkers have blamed this on everything from these countries' lack of sellable assets to their inherently non-entrepreneurial "mindset." In this book, the renowned Peruvian economist and adviser to presidents and prime ministers Hernando de Soto proposes and argues another reason: it's not that poor, postcommunist countries don't have the assets to make capitalism flourish. As de Soto points out by way of example, in Egypt, the wealth the poor have accumulated is worth 55 times as much as the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including that spent on building the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam.
No, the real problem is that such countries have yet to establish and normalize the invisible network of laws that turns assets from "dead" into "liquid" capital. In the West, standardized laws allow us to mortgage a house to raise money for a new venture, permit the worth of a company to be broken up into so many publicly tradable stocks, and make it possible to govern and appraise property with agreed-upon rules that hold across neighborhoods, towns, or regions. This invisible infrastructure of "asset management"--so taken for granted in the West, even though it has only fully existed in the United States for the past 100 years--is the missing ingredient to success with capitalism, insists de Soto. But even though that link is primarily a legal one, he argues that the process of making it a normalized component of a society is more a political--or attitude-changing--challenge than anything else.
With a fleet of researchers, de Soto has sought out detailed evidence from struggling economies around the world to back up his claims. The result is a fascinating and solidly supported look at the one component that's holding much of the world back from developing healthy free markets. --Timothy Murphy --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The $2 trillion owed by the third and fourth world will never be repaid AND the international bankers HAVE KNOWN that since DAY ONE. The international bankers just have to con ordinary 1st world taxpayers to cover the losses without figuring out the scam.
This article is a collossal misdirection to deflect the real issue. Who is, "we" in the above quote? Not one 3rd or 4th world governments owes me a penny. I do not have to address the issue of how that debt is to be resolved. That is the problem of the international bankers.
If recent history is any guide, the IMF will ride into one country after another pretending to be the welfare case worker helping the poor debtor nation out of its problems. In actuality, the IMF is merely the collection agent for the international bankers. They will pledge OUR hard earned money to the country so the country can pay the international bankers to maintain their credit rating. The G-7 governments will not tax us for the money, because we might object. Instead, they will borrow it from the very international bankers that are being bailed out.
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