Capitalism: The Cure for Africa

As America approached its birthday, bottom-feeders from around the world also rose. Particularly disgusting was all of the written, verbal, and television manure regarding Africa. Tony Blair, who is--don't forget--a socialist, wants everybody who has a pot to pee in to forgive African countries' debts. It is as though, freed from the debts, these countries will burst by sudden leap into the 21st century with health, hygeine, prosperity, productivity, and, above all, individual freedom. The same kind of thinking goes into amnesty for wetbacks. Both get the same results every time, and that means OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER. So why do it again?

The Detritus Tribe have been demonstrating in Scotland against the G-8 Summit and its nations. What to they hate? Why, it is freedom, rights, truth, reality, prosperity, health, hygeine, productivity, and so on. No, of course they would not be caught dead saying what they mean, so they do the old Leftie trick of wrap feces in fine chocolate candy wrappers, hoping no one will notice the difference. We notice. These rabble hate CAPITALISM, the same force that puts food into their well-fed bodies, puts clothes on their backs, pays their way from international cesspools to Scotland and provides the money for their upkeep, and so on. These people live the lie all the time. It is what Ayn Rand called the Fallacy of the Stolen Concept: They denigrate and deny the concept on which their very lives metaphysically depend.

Then there is the G-8 Summit. What is it about? It is said to be about lifing Africa from poverty. You may count on certain things. The cause for Africa's poverty will not be identified or defined in any fundamental way. Senile Europe (aka, "old Europe," per Secretary Rumsfeld) will make sure that all countries come aboard on the necessity that the "cure" means pouring more money down the rathole of Africa. Maybe, just maybe, someone will mention the necessity for "free markets," or an equivalent term, but no one will dare to say "capitalism." They, after all, are embarrassed by the term, as are the American delegates. What irony: embarrassed by the best means life has to offer for the pursuit of happiness!

Then there were the "concerts." Everywhere, cacaphony was raised to the level of supreme banality. More banal yet were the publicized statements of various performers. This was nothing more than carnal narcissistic hedonism wrapped as "doing good." It was only "feeling good." And that was for those whose souls are impaired enough to regard the banal cacaphony and intent of the various concerts as "good." The money will go the way of all corruption, just as it has done from previous efforts.

Meanwhile, Africa, without DDT, without Clorox, without soap, boiled water, and UTTERLY SIMPLE SANITATION FOR URINE, FECES, ANY OTHER BIOPRODUCTS--AND THAT GREATEST OF ALL ACTS, HANDWASHING, wipes flies from its gooey eyes, digs dirt with sticks, spreads AIDS and other diseases through COMPLETE AND TOTAL IGNORANCE AND UNWILLINGNESS TO CHANGE. Why is Africa impoverished? Why not?

They don't need dollars, euros, etc. They need books, literacy, simple behavioral changes so that even the most primitive levels of capitalism can start and spread. There are so many examples such as those of impoverished women borrowing a mere $15 to start a home business that lifts them from the Stone Age. That is capitalism.

Well, Dr. Andrew Bernstein, a member of the Ayn Rand Institute and a professor philosophy, provides material that every one of us should save, copy, print, and send to friends, relatives, Congresspersons, etc.

Capitalism: The Cure for Africa, By Andrew Bernstein, FrontPageMagazine.com June 17, 2005


The current plan of George Bush and Tony Blair to send billions more in aid to Africa is futile. History demonstrates that brutal dictatorships and savage tribes engaged in internecine warfare are not transformed by handouts. After all, billions of dollars have already been poured into Africa. What Africa needs is freedom, not welfare. The West should reject the idea that it is our responsibility to lift Africans out of their poverty--and then tell them of the system that enabled the West to gain its current wealth and power: capitalism.

Most people forget that pre-industrial Europe was vastly poorer than contemporary Africa and had a much lower life expectancy. Even a relatively well-off country like France is estimated to have suffered seven general famines in the 15th century, thirteen in the 16th, eleven in the 17th and sixteen in the 18th. And disease was rampant. Given an utter lack of sanitation, the bubonic plague, typhus and other diseases recurred incessantly into the 18th century, killing tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands at a time.

The effect on life expectancy was predictable. In parts of France, in the middle of the 7th century, only 58 percent reached their 15th birthday, and life expectancy was 0. In Ireland, life expectancy in 1800 was a mere 19 years. In early 18th century London, more than 74 percent of the children died before reaching age five.

Then a dramatic change occurred throughout Europe. The population of England doubled between 1750 and 1820, with childhood mortality dropping to 31.8 percent by 1830. Something happened that enabled people to stay alive.

What did that early period lack that the later period had? Capitalism. What does Africa lack today that the West has? Capitalism (or, more accurately, partial apitalism).

What is capitalism? It is an economic system in which all property is privately owned, a system without government regulation and government handouts. It is a free economy, a system in which individuals are free to produce, to trade, and to make--and keep--a profit.

More fundamentally, capitalism is the social system that upholds individual rights,the right of every individual to his life, his liberty, his property, and the pursuit of his own happiness. The thinkers of the Enlightenment, including John Locke and the Founding Fathers, brought these ideas to the forefront in Europe and America. The result was an economic revolution, which--in a relatively brief time--transformed the West from a poverty-stricken region to one of great productive wealth. This system of freedom liberated the most creative minds of Western society, resulting in a torrent of innovations--from James Watt's steam engine to Louis Pasteur's germ theory to Henry Ford's automobile to the Wright Brothers' airplane and much more. This new freedom, and the Industrial Revolution it spawned, resulted in vast increases in agricultural and industrial production.

Creative minds--from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs--flourish only under freedom. The result is new products, new jobs, new wealth, in short: the furtherance of life on earth, in length, quantity and quality. Under the kingdoms, theocracies, military dictatorships and socialist regimes that dominate Africa, such minds are stifled. The result is stagnation, poverty and death.

Africa has the identical natural resource fundamentally responsible for the West's rise: the human mind. But it has neither the freedom nor the Enlightenment philosophy of reason, individualism and political liberty necessary for creating wealth and health. Africa is mired in tribal cultures that stress subordination to the group rather than personal independence and achievement. All over the continent brutal dictators murder and rob innocent citizens in order to aggrandize themselves and members of their tribes.

What Africa desperately needs is to remove its political and economic shackles and replace them with political and economic freedom. It needs to depose the military dictators and socialist regimes and establish capitalism, with its political/economic freedom, its rule of law, its uncompromising respect for individual rights. And to accomplish that, it first needs to remove its philosophic shackles and replace tribal collectivism with a philosophy of reason and freedom.

The truly humanitarian system is not the one still espoused by most Western intellectuals, viz., Marxism (and its offshoots), but the system based on the individual’s right to pursue his own life and happiness: capitalism.