[Cicero]

Funny. This guy can write. I wonder how he ended up writing for the Independent.

[July 4th]

The problem? The assets owned by the poor aren't legally held. Ownership rights aren't documented. Titles aren't registered. Property can't be traded or used as security for a loan, or as a share for investment.

It's an interesting argument, and a better place to start than where the UN and EU always look, first blaming the West for poverty, then asking for money.

[RLK]

It's a marvellously reassuring book for wealthy Westerners because it tells us thet poverty in the Third World isn't our fault.

-----------------------------

If the United States and any/all other countries supposedly responsible for third world poverty would disappear or have never developed, the third world would be just as poor as it is now, or has ever been.

[Big Bunyip]

What's so innovative about advocating property rights?

[nicollo]

Where are the radicals, where are the revolutionaries? What the world's poor (bastards) need is Jefferson, not Bono.

For every stupid yelp at America a kid is shot in the head in the third world by infested water, spoiled bags of grain, a stolen ballot, or a Swiss bank account. The Third World needs political clarity, not American charity, a local tax cut, not American tax dollars. And so on, straight into the Bill or Rights.

Instead...
- There's Chavez, sucking dollars through a syphen hooked up to American gasoline tanks, bad-mouthing his lifeline...
- There's Jiang showing off China's first Supercomputer, INTEL INSIDE, worshipping the virtues of his broken nation, whose only salvation he knows is to turn to the American example of property rights, guarantee of contract, etc. (none of which will ever be secure without a free press and an armed citizenry...)...
- There's Chirac demanding a tax on American superiority in order to cover his national sense of guilt and inferiority...
- There's Kofi, hiding his ass behind UN floor votes to cover up his joined and upright palms...
- There's Saddam, pissing on his foot, counting grains of sand in fear of that one that marks the cruise missile aimed at his head, wondering exactly why he thought he could turn on his masters...

When will our college adolescents, doped on dissent, scurrying about in their Nikes like traders on the NYSE floor on a bad day in August, following the nearest raised fist, smoke a genuinely radical thought? Try this: "We hold these truths to be self evident..." Instead they ride about in metric, scream in international sign, and cower behind poetry and truly bad music. Meanwhile, the car loans are signed in English. (There's a good reason we're the last bastion of inches and pounds, a most ridiculous and sublimely stupid system that even Arab princes have to suck on when they're giving us our money back in Las Vegas.)

American greed has spared more lives than were squashed by Stalin, Mao, and Hitler combined. Start with Morse's codified revolution that shrunk continents, Carnegie's tempered steel that framed every modern life, the Wright flying machine that made man a god, Henry Ford's cheap cars and tractors that salvaged the world from horse manure, go to the clean water needed to brew Coca-Cola, the advertising dollars spread about by Phillip-Morris, cheap-ass wages five times the local rate paid by Nike, or the tonics peddled by Bristol-Meyers, unlike despots, communists, and fools, Americans don't advance themselves by killing off their client base.

I can't wait for the morons to show up at the next IMF meetings and protest capitalism. I'll be there at the front lines, my sign high calling the IMF, the World Bank, and the multinationalists cowards for selling money so expensive when good ideas are overstocked and cheap, right here at the corner store.



----
Damn, I feel better now.

[farmfriend]

ping

[Billy_bob_bob]

This is the guy who wrote the article that helped me realize the one single, overriding and overwhelming difference between the rich and poor nations of the world. That difference is the fact that the "rich" nations of the world have the social and legal infrastructure required for the creation and protection of wealth.

If you have a culture that says "those who have nice things are pigs, and we the people have the right to kill them and take those things for ourselves" then you end up with a country like Zimbabwe. If you have a society that says "the police pay for their badges and then shake down everyone they run across for their income" then you end up with a nation like Mexico.

The funny thing about this viewpoint is that it makes perfect sense to someone with any inclination towards understanding enviromental studies. First you need the social and legal infrastructure (the "environment", if you will), and then the growth follows. Those who focus on creating the environment for growth are rewarded with harvests of plenty. Those who focus on redistributing the products of wealth produced by others are doomed to harvest sorrow.

[PsyOp]

"All systems either of preference or of restrainst, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men." - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776.

[snopercod]

Thanks for posting this. It seems that such articles are not welcomed by the U.S. media.

Bugger the people? Here's more on that subject from Great Britain:

The Rise of the FU Movement

[Quix]

FILES