Victory for some...

For the Soviet Union the Second World War ended 70 years ago. For millions in Eastern Europe, it was the beginning of another occupation by an utterly fascist system, an occupation that would last around 45 years. For German women it was the beginning of a massive rape wave, perhaps the biggest in human history, with Russian troops defiling any woman they could find. Women as old as 80 years and girls as young as 8 years were raped. Millions were raped, and hundreds of thousands died as a result. There were roughly 200 000 victims of rape in Berlin alone. These weren't merely reprisals for all the horrors that Nazis had inflicted on Soviet citizens; on their way toward Berlin, the Russians raped Belarusians, Poles, Ukrainians, Jews and even Russians liberated from labor camps and wives of German communists. This was officially encouraged, even if nominally banned. The higher-ups encouraged the mass rapes as a means to terrorize local populations and to reward Soviet soldiers. At the end of the day Soviet authorities, kinda like the modern Finnish justice system, did not consider rape a serious offense. Hitler himself had contributed greatly to the peril of German women (and civilians in general) by preventing the evacuation of German civilians in places such as East Prussia, where the Russians really went cavemen on the local population.

Unlike Germany, Russia, as a victor, has been unwilling to learn from history even though their current problems with their "near abroad" and with NATO expansion have everything to do with Soviet/Russian history of repression. Poland and the Baltic states are now NATO members because of their repression under Russian rule. World War II began with a joint Nazi-Soviet attack on Poland. Tens of thousands of important Poles were massacred by the Soviets during this first occupation period. Later, as the Germans were being pushed back, Stalin couldn't have cared less about liberating anyone; Poland was merely another territory to conquer and hold, which is why he prevented the United States from aiding Polish partisans (the Home Army) in their desperate struggle against Germany. Today's Ukraine is divided over Russia because Stalin first starved the Ukrainian population to death (Holodomor), then resettled the country with Russians. (Mistakes such as this and the purges almost cost the Soviets the war.) The entire population of Crimea was deported and replaced with Russians. After the war Stalin downplayed the importance of the Holocaust because the plight of the Jewish people didn't fit the general history of the "Great Patriotic War", and because so many Soviet citizens (including Ukrainians and non-Soviet Poles) had actively participated in the genocide.

Of course, there is little question the Nazis were worse. Had the Nazis won the war, Poland, for example, would have been colonized and its Polish population either exterminated or enslaved (and then exterminated), and its cities razed to the ground. As Bloodlands makes clear, when it comes to the systematic murder of innocent men, women and children, Nazis easily outperformed the Soviet Union. As far as the Nazis were concerned, murder was the objective. In the Soviet Union murder was a means to an end. Soviets killed Soviets; Germans killed non-Germans. Soviets killed before the war, Germans during the war. Stalin may have gotten a head start with the mass killings, but once the Nazis crossed the Molotov-Ribbentrop line in 1941, they more than made up for it, first by having the Einsatzgruppen shoot any Jews they could find, and then, as the war went on, by building gas chambers with which they could murder on an industrial scale. During the war, the Nazis perfected a psychopath-run (hence the "banality of evil") genocide machine, which enabled them to murder so many Jews in such a short time in such a difficult environment.

Below are several bits from Bloodlands:

"The men of the Dirlewanger Brigade burned down three hospitals with patients inside. At one hospital, wounded Germans who were being treated by Polish doctors and nurses asked that no harm come to the Poles. This was not to be. The men of the Dirlewanger Brigade killed the Polish wounded. They brought the nurses back to camp that evening, as was the custom: each night selected women would be whipped by officers and then gang-raped before being murdered. This evening was unusual even by those standards. To the accompaniment of flute music, the men raised a gallows, and then hanged the doctors and the naked nurses."

"...in roundups that took several days, the Germans and the Jewish police would blockade particular blocks or particular houses, and force their inhabitants to go to a collection point. Germans shot small children, pregnant women, and the handicapped or elderly on the spot. In larger towns and cities where more than one roundup was necessary, these measures were repated with increasing violence. The Germans were aiming for daily quotas to fill trains, and would sometimes pass on quotas to the Jewish police who were responsible (at the risk of their own position and thus lives) for filling them."

"In October 1941, Mahileu became the first substantial city in occupied Soviet Belarus where almost all Jews were killed. A German (Austrian) policeman wrote to his wife of his feelings and experiences shooting the city's Jews in the first days of the month. 'During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.'"

"Having surrendered their valuables and documents, people were forced to strip naked. Then they were driven by threats or by shots fired overhead, in groups of about ten, to the edge of a ravine known as Babi Yar. Many of them were beaten: Pronicheva remembered that people 'were already bloody as they went to be shot.' They had to lie down on their stomachs on the corpses already beneath them, and wait for the shots to come from above and behind. Then would come the next group. Jews came and died for thirty-six hours. (...) One naked mother spent what she must have known were her last few seconds of life breastfeeding her baby. When the baby was thrown alive into the ravine, she jumped after it, and in that way found her death. Only there in the ditch were these people reduced to nothing, or to their number, which was 33,761."

"Jewish women suffered in particular ways. Despite regulations against "racial defilement," some Germans quickly developed a taste for rape as prelude to murder. At least once Germans carried out a "beauty contest" of Jewish women, taking them to the cemetery, forcing them to strip naked, and then killing them. In the ghetto, German soldiers would force Jewish girls to dance naked at night; in the morning only the girls' corpses remained. Perla Aginskaia recalled what she saw in a dark apartment in the Minsk ghetto one evening in autumn 1941: 'a little room, a table, a bed. Blood was streaming down the girl's body from deep, blackish wounds in her chest. It was quite clear that the girl had been raped and killed. There were gunshot wounds around her genitals.'" 

The Nazis also wiped out entire villages in counter-productive anti-partisan reprisals: for every German killed, hundreds of innocent civilians were murdered. Such operations took place not only in the East but in Western Europe as well. In the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, a Waffen-SS company massacred 600 civilians by a mistake (in the sense that they intended to massacre the inhabitants of another village). The men were separated from the rest, shot and then burned (while still alive). The women and children were taken to a church which was then set on fire. Those trying to escape were shot with machineguns. A baby was crucified.

So, if anything good came out of World War II, it was the physical extermination of what Hitler called the "good ones" of the Germanic race; the barbaric, racist, warmongering Germans with psychopathic and sadistic tendencies.

But in the very long run, Communism outperformed Nazism: the big difference between Nazism and Communism was their longevity. Nazis fell far short of their extermination targets due to the quick self-implosion of the Herrenvolk. Communism was much more long-lived and thus managed to amass a higher body count.

The ramblings of a lunatic

Finished reading Mein Kampf (an English translation of it to be exact, not the one filled with notes). There's been a lot of debate among historians as to whether Hitler's policies once he became chancellor followed a careful plan or whether those policies (such as the Holocaust) emerged more spontaneously, as a reaction to changing circumstances. Some Nazi sympathizers even claim Hitler had no choice but to do what he did because of the hostility of his foreign adversaries. To me it's quite clear that everything that happened was laid out in detail in this book, written in the mid 1920s, and that no one in Germany or abroad could honestly claim they did now know what Hitler's intentions were.

Reading the book, it's obvious Hitler is bored by economics. He rants a lot about Marxism but very little about its economic implications. He sympathizes with workers and blames the bourgeoisie (and Jews) for the rise of Marxism among the working class. In his views, employers should consider the welfare of the community first and avoid excess discrepancies in wage rates. Hitler's views on capital and stock markets aren't too different from those advocated by the contemporary utopian-fascist Zeitgeist movement. In Hitler's mind, the ills of both Capitalism and Communism are fused together in the "International Jew" who seeks to destroy national economies through the stock market, thus forging some kind of a "Eternal Jewish Empire". To prevent that, national economies such as that of Germany must be liberated from "interest slavery" and the machinations of the stock market. Throughout the book, Marxism is practically considered synonymous with the Jew.

Hitler does not explicitly state any plan to exterminate the Jewish people; but then again he didn't mention anything about that even as the Holocaust was under way. Still, it's quite obvious Hitler harbored such plans early on. He believes Jews would not be content with a state in Palestine because of their supposedly international character; such a state would merely function as a base of operations for the Jews' global quest to destroy all non-Jewish nation states. Regrettably, Hitler doesn't go into detail about the roots of his antisemitism. In his childhood and teens, he was even sympathetic toward the Jewish people for all the persecutions that had taken place in the past. Then, in Vienna, Hitler seems to have been brainwashed by antisemitic literature such as Protocols and Henry Ford's (the American car industrialist) writings. Why he decided to believe such obvious nonsense remains a mystery but then again the vast majority of people on this planet believe in something stupid, be that gods, homeopathy, astrology, UFO landings or 9/11 conspiracies. In the past persecution of Jews has served the self-interests of the persecuting parties (such as the financial and religious interests of spendthrift and zealous monarchs), but if Hitler had merely wanted to use Jews as scapegoats, he probably wouldn't have murdered millions of them in secret. Quite simply, Hitler was both an idiot and a racist.

Hitler is more explicit about exterminating opposing political ideologies and their proponents, expressing regret at the missed opportunity at the end of the World War to exterminate Marxists. Hitler believes that any half-assed attempt to destroy a doctrine is bound to be counter-productive. Therefore, any attempt to destroy a doctrine must be thorough and persistent, but even then such an attempt is almost certain to fail unless combined with a "spiritual revolution" (e.g., National Socialism against Marxism): "Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain." He's also explicit about destroying parliamentarianism, even clearly stating the Nazis would participate in parliamentary institutions only to destroy such institutions for good. In this Gospel of Open and Explicit Intolerance, Hitler has, it seems, learned from the best:

"Here, too, we can learn by the example of the Catholic Church. Though its doctrinal edifice, and in part quite superfluously, comes into collision with exact science and research, it is none the less willing to sacrifice so much as one little syllable of its dogmas. It has recognized quite correctly that its power of resistance does not lie in its lesser or greater adaptation to the scientific findings of the moment, which in reality are always fluctuating, but rather in rigidly holding to dogmas once established, for it is only such dogmas which lend to the whole body the character of a faith."

"The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted negotiations for compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the ancient world, but in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for its own doctrine."

"Christianity could not content itself with building up its own altar; it was absolutely forced to undertake the destruction of the heathen altars. Only from this fanatical intolerance could its apodictic faith take form; this intolerance is, in fact, its absolute presupposition."

"The individual may establish with pain today that with the appearance of Christianity the first spiritual terror entered into the far freer ancient world, but he will not be able to contest the fact that since then the world has been afflicted and dominated by this coercion, and that coercion is broken only by coercion."

What is also explicitly stated is the Nazi policy of Lebensraum, that, in order to survive, the German nation must extend its frontiers at the expense of Russia and other territories inhabited by Slavic peoples. He criticizes the Second Reich for adopting a policy of trade & overseas colonies (thus putting Germany on a collision course with the British Empire) rather than of eastward conquest. This perceived necessity of soil acquisition seems to be another result of Hitler's poor understanding of economics: he believes more in Malthusian alarmism than technological progress and trade. Hitler also mentions the necessity to enslave lower races, comparing that to the exploitation and domestication of animals. What later became known as Generalplan Ost, a plan to conquer, enslave and exterminate tens of millions of people in Eastern Europe, is the core Nazi foreign policy doctrine through which everything else is viewed. In order to execute the plan, however, Germany's western front, i.e., France, the "mortal enemy" of Germany, must first be secured militarily, preferably with the aid of the British Empire. Hitler doesn't believe Germany's issues with France can be resolved through defensive strategies but instead pushes for a "final active reckoning with France". The resulting "destruction of France" would merely be a means to enable eastward expansion, not an end in itself. (Hitler seems to consider himself a realist as he emphasizes that Germany should never bother with humanitarian affairs but instead pursue the national interest vigorously, but of course his ideas come off as utopian, reckless and idealistic: Bismarck would turn in his grave. Hitler is not completely paranoid about France though; many French politicians and military leaders were calling for Germany's partition.)

Hitler is also, no surprise, extremely socially conservative. He sees women as passive beings whose job is to get married and start having children, he seems obsessed with STDs, prostitution and contraceptives, proposing early marriage as a solution. Also, like many conservative men, he drools over the idea of a teenage boy's well-trained body. Hitler makes numerous references to God, and believes his actions are guided by Fate/Providence, and sees many benefits in religions ("Precisely for the masses, faith is often the sole foundation of a moral attitude.") but doesn't come off as an adherent to any specific religious doctrine. He even employs God to support his racial views: if "defectives" are allowed to propagate, then in a few hundred years' time "you will find but few images of God, unless you want to profane the Almighty"; thus preventing these people from propagating would be "the most humane act of mankind". He also criticizes Jews on religious grounds, claiming theirs is not a religion at all: "The Jew cannot possess a religious institution, if for no other reason because he lacks idealism in any form, and hence belief in a hereafter is absolutely foreign to him (...) The Talmud is not a book to prepare a man for the hereafter, but only for a practical and profitable life in this world." Jesus is applauded for fighting the Jews' exploitation of religion for financial gain when he tosses them out of the Temple.

In addition to Hitler's views on the Jewish people, his views on the First World War illuminate his selective reading of history. Like many in Germany at that time, Hitler believed the war was not lost on the battlefield, conveniently forgetting the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the constant influx of fresh American troops & supplies, and the lack of resources at Germany's disposal. While he viewed the alliance with the Habsburgs with disgust, he perceived the war as inevitable and ultimately fought for German freedom and independence. The lost territories would be regained, along with other German-inhabited regions, in due time and not through peaceful negotiations: "We must clearly recognize the fact that the recovery of the lost territories is not won through solemn appeals to the Lord or through pious hopes in a League of Nations, but only by force of arms." Of course Chamberlain tried to spoil his fun by completely giving in to his outrageous, unreasonable demands. With the gift of hindsight, we know that Hitler would have none of it, for in his mind "Germany will either be a world power or there will be no Germany".

The German people empowered Hitler with absolute authority to do away with democracy, institute racial laws, attack foreign countries and kill millions of people. They shouldn't have been surprised when bombs started falling on their cities.

Why the North might want war

Many are asking what could North Korea possibly gain from an all-out war, a war that'd certainly lead to its own destruction. If North Korea really wants to provoke a war, it will be because of this:

(The Washington Post)

Their military equipment is at least fifty years old, nearing or way past its "best before" date. Soon it will be of little use and North Korea has absolutely no money (or anything for that matter) to obtain new equipment. And, with the Soviet Union long gone, they've got no real friends either. Combine this with the fact that the North Korean regime probably truly believes that the United States and South Korea are out to get them, just waiting for the right moment to invade, and you end up with a regime that believes it's running out of time. Either they set off what they believe to be inevitable now that they still have the initiative, or they wait and watch their (largely imaginary) military prowess decay and fade away, leaving behind a carcass of a country, to be consumed by the vulturous America and South Korea.

So yes, in the crazy, self-induced world the North Korean regime lives in, a war would make sense.

The price of a non-marketable good

Came across this crazy piece of news. A pair inherits an art piece ("Canyon") worth $65 million and has to pay an inheritance tax worth $29 million. The problem, however, is that the art piece includes a stuffed bald eagle, which cannot be sold since the bird is protected. (Obviously, if a stuffed bald eagle could be sold this would only encourage people to hunt them.) In other words, "Canyon" cannot be sold due to the stuffed bald eagle and yet the pair is stuck with a tax bill of $29 million. So how can it have a price tag of $65 million? How can a non-marketable good have a market value (the price of collectibles is obviously based on their market value, not some out-of-the-hat valuation)?

Even more worrying, the IRS is acting like the vengeful, petty bureaucrats that they are:

Placing a value on an item that cannot be sold is no easy feat. The venerable auction house Christie’s placed the value of "Canyon" at zero. The IRS initially put it at $15 million, then jumped the figure to $65 million when Sundell and Homem refused to pay, according to The New York Times.
The IRS, which declined to comment on the matter, is not only asking for $29 million in taxes, but also an $11.7 million “gross valuation misstatement” penalty, according to Forbes.

Inheritance taxes are nuts anyway. What exactly has the federal government done to deserve $29 million out of "Canyon"? They're simply robbing someone's estate.

China is not a model

The Economist has another typical article that degenerates into treating China with words like "ooh" and "aah". First the article lists economic and political similarities between the US and the EU and then starts drawing comparisons to China, implying that the Chinese government (or any authoritarian regime) could cope with financial crises more effectively than "dysfunctional" democracies. Maybe, but let's not start treating China as some kind of a model until comparisons between the West and China become valid. Despite the fact that the Chinese GDP soon catches up with that of the US, their current GDP per capita is less than one tenth of that of the US. The time to start drawing comparisons is when the Communist party has made it possible for the Chinese to enjoy Western levels of prosperity. With their current political and economic system there's no chance of that happening.

There's one good point there though: "Every year China continues to grow, the case that countries need to be democracies in order to become wealthy and developed becomes more tenuous."

Of course, this is nothing new. During the Cold War many 3rd world countries adopted the Soviet system as an economic model. What failed them was not any lack of democracy but the centrally-planned economic system that China has now somewhat abandoned. Even in the West many countries were economically liberal before they were politically liberal. It was the wealth brought on by Capitalism that made people in the West demand more political liberties. This is also what makes the Chinese leadership so nervous.

It is Capitalism that brings stability in the first place because materially well-off people have a lot to lose if they resort to petty factionalism. (No wonder then that Communist revolutions took place exactly where Marx least expected them.) This is why democratic countries that have been made prosperous by Capitalism are stable while attempts to introduce democracy prior to Capitalism tend to result in failures.

The New Anti-Semitic Alliance

Benjamin Netanyahu:

“There is a new boiling anti-semitism of radical Islam that sweeps Europe as a whole, and there’s a strange fusion – it’s the only word I can use to describe it — a fusion with the anti-semitism of the radical far far left,”

“This is the strangest union you could possibly contemplate,”... “because radical Muslims: they stone women, they execute gays, they are against any human rights, against feminism, against whathaveyou. And the far left is supposed to be for these things.” (Washington Times)

I wonder when the left wakes up to this reality.

The Power of Ideas and the Middle East

I recently finished reading Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, a controversial book according to which the liberal democratic system would ultimately prevail over alternatives. The book, based on an article in the National Interest, was written at a time when the Soviet system was collapsing. To put it simply, Fukuyama's thesis relies on two arguments:

1) Scientific knowledge, which Fukuyama associates with modern capitalism, accumulates in the sense that it's not possible to reverse the course of scientific advancement and as such it's not really possible to reverse the course of human history (for extended periods, that is).

2) People everywhere possess what Fukuyama calls thymos (from Ancient Greek), the desire for recognition, which goes unfulfilled in non-democratic systems because dictatorships don't recognize individuals as sovereign, as adults capable of independent thought and action. Thymos is just one part of the soul, however, as the soul also has desiring and reasoning parts.

If prosperity brought on by the free-market economy can fulfill the desiring and reasoning parts of the "soul", the thymotic part of the soul can only be fulfilled by granting the individual some inalienable rights, including the right to participate in the political process. Democracy can also effectively restrain individuals with megalothymia, the desire to be recognized as superior to others, while still allowing these individuals to excel in ways that don't interfere with the rights of others. And once this liberal democratic system has been imposed, it's unlikely to collapse. We may have thousands of unsatisfied people at any given time but they have no credible alternatives to liberal democracy. (The downside, according to Fukuyama, is that a world where people no longer have to struggle for recognition is a world without great human achivements; a world that is, simply put, boring.)

Fukuyama's book was written at a time when Easter Europe was going through a series of revolutions, the Autumn of Nations, which resulted in what had been considered unthinkable up until then; total disintegration of the Soviet Union with no shots fired (technically that's not true but you get the point). Now there's a chance of something similar happening in the Middle East, at least with respect to "struggle for recognition".

Of course the events in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Jordan are not the first phases of a liberal revolution but they do address something that Arab dictators have long tried to ignore; the need of the average Arab citizen to be recognized as a citizen, not a subject. But the definition of a citizen varies as there are more competing societal models in the Middle East than there were in Europe in 1989. Communism had promised material abundance which never materialized. The free market system, on the other hand, had been tried and proven by then, so there was no question as to what should replace communism. Traditional authoritarianism in the Middle East might as well be replaced with an Islamic alternative. Islam is hostile to both free markets and democracy and Islamic movements in countries such as Egypt are anxious to consolidate power after having settled for a minor role for decades.

Islam remains a threat to the Middle East because there's no tradition of secularism in the Muslim world. Europe had Reformation, and the wars it brought, but many Muslims still dream of going back to the old days, days when the Muslim world was united under one caliphate bent on expansion. Fukuyama argues that Christianity contributed to democracy in spreading the idea that all people are equal in the eyes of God. The problem was that this would matter in afterlife only. God had to be taken off the equation - Christianity had to be secularized (at first via Reformation, then via the Enlightenment) before the idea of equality could be applied to our existence on this rock. Except for countries like Turkey which went through a process of quick and forced secularization, the Muslim world has yet to witness a similar process.

But while the current situation is not a liberal revolution and while it carries great risks, it's not the starting point for the establishment of a new caliphate either. Yesterday (on Fox News) Glenn Beck was going on about how the situation in the Middle East could lead to the establishment of a new caliphate, stretching all the way from Pakistan to the UK. This is of course a completely ludicrous idea. While there's no tradition of secularism in the Muslim world, the average Egyptian is not exactly a puritan Muslim either and as such is not too keen to hand power to extremists. The very fact that the extremist Muslim Brotherhood has tried to appear as a moderate force throughout the crisis pretty much proves this. Egypt is not the Iran of 1979 in the sense that there isn't a similar backlash against modernization (Westernization) in Egypt. Another obstacle to a caliphate is nationalism, which played a prominent role in the struggle against European colonial powers. While the Muslim identity surpasses the national identity, this does not automatically mend fences between dozens of Muslim groups. The United Arab Republic lasted for only three years even at a time when Egypt and Syria shared a common enemy. With different factions killing - or waiting for the opportunity to kill - each other, how can anyone expect these people to form a caliphate when they are nowhere near getting their own houses in order? The fact that Beck wears glasses these days doesn't make him any smarter. 

At the moment the situation in the Middle East seems chaotic and the outcome unpredictable but the prospect of a change in a system that is hostile to all three parts of Fukuyama's "soul" sounds better than mere stability. The status quo, which the Western world has helped maintain, has been feeding resentment in the Middle East for decades now with hardly any proof that it's been worth it.

"Cairo today is all of Egypt," he said. "I want my son to have a better life and not suffer as much as I did ... I want to feel like I chose my president."

LaFeber's recipe for economic growth

In one of the most biased textbooks I have ever read, Walter LaFeber states the following in his America, Russia, and the Cold War:

5. Are the American people prepared for the post-Cold War world?
(...) The Soviet Union, after all, rotted from the inside out. On the other hand, Japan's and Germany's rise to economic power occurred because of their educated workforces, intelligent governmental guidance, ability to plan long-term and high savings rates (three to four times the rates of Americans) that catered money for investment rather than a towering consumer indebtedness.

Not a mention of free markets, only references to planning, guidance and having lots of intelligent people. If that's all it takes, then why exactly did the Soviet Union collapse? They had some of the best scientists in the world, free university education and a whole lot of planning. I guess their planning wasn't intelligent enough. The Soviet Union also had a high investment rate, with investments allocated by "intelligent" technocrats. And how did it turn out?

As for Japan and Germany, neither really managed to plan long-term. The Japanese government got so entangled in subsidizing its enterprises that when the time came to pull the plug, they couldn't, as a result of which Japan has had two lost decades. Germany has been liberalizing its economy precisely because some of the welfare state policies it adopted are not sustainable in the long run. When these two economies grew the fastest after the war, it was in large part thanks to catching up after being torn to pieces by years of war. Compared to the rest of the world, their economies were still overwhelmingly liberal (as in free). The fact is that both countries would have witnessed similar, maybe even much higher, growth rates if their governments had simply kept their hands off. This is the recipe that allowed the West to rise above the rest of the world in the first place, long before anyone even dared to mention "public education".

Praising education as some Holy Grail is dangerous; it sends governments on a wild-goose chase, as if educating the people of Africa somehow could bring about an economic miracle. Don't forget that our comprehensive public education system appeared relatively late, decades after we had shed ourselves of extreme poverty that so plagues the (un)developing world.

Sosialismin ja kehitysavun runtelema Tansania

Kirjassa Presidentin ministeriö II (1970-1981) paneudutaan yhdessä alaluvussa Suomen kehitysyhteistyötoimintaan Tansaniassa, joka oli "tärkein Suomen kahdenkeskisen kehitysavun päävastaanottajamaista" 70-luvulla:

Pohjoismailla ja sosiaalidemokraateilla oli erityinen "ideologinen rakkaus" Tansaniaan. Nyereren pyrkimykset ja tavoitteet nähtiin "jaloina".

Ulkoasiainministeriön sinisilmäiset virkamiehet, lähinnä sosiaalidemokraatit, kannattivat kymmenien miljoonien markkojen hankkeita Tansaniassa. (Näiden virkamiesten joukossa oli myös suurlähettiläs Martti Ahtisaari.) Tansania oli tuolloin sitoutunut suunnitelmatalouteen ja "maailman uuteen talousjärjestykseen", jota myös Suomi kannatti. Lukuunottamatta Paul Samuelsonin kaltaisia, matemaattisen mallentamisen sokaisemia ekonomisteja, suunnitelmatalouden ongelmat olivat hyvin taloustieteen tiedossa. Tämä ei estänyt satojen miljoonien markkojen sysäämistä tähän(kin) afrikkalaiseen katastrofiin. Wikipedian mukaan Tansania muuttui muutamassa vuodessa Afrikan merkittävimmästä maataloustuotteiden viejästä Afrikan merkittävimmäksi maataloustuotteiden tuojaksi. Kollektivisointeja tehostettiin mm. polttamalla kyliä. Näin toimi diktaattori Nyerere, jonka tavoitteita vasemmistolaiset pitivät "jaloina".

Tässä siis vain yksi esimerkki ei ainoastaan kehitysavun hyödyttömyydestä, vaan myös siitä, miten häikäilemättömästi diktaattorit käyttävät kehitysapurahoja omien mielisairaiden projektiensa toteuttamiseen. Käytännössä mikä tahansa afrikkalainen valtio toimisi esimerkkinä tästä, mutta eipä näytä menevän suomalaiselle intelligentsialle kaaliin.

Kirjassa mainitaan vielä, että 70-luvulla "Tansania kuului maailman 25 köyhimmän maan joukkoon". Maailmanpankin mukaan Tansania on tänään maailman 23. köyhin maa. Aid well spent!

Rooted in the same philosophy

Parts of a Nazi Party program adopted in 1920:

We ask that the government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living.

The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the good of all. Therefore, we demand: ... an end to the power of the financial interests.

[We] combat the... [Jewish-]materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of The Common Good Before the Individual Good.

-Der Nationalsozialismus Dokumente 1933-1945, edited by Walther Hofer

Ecuador

BBC (13th December 2008):

Ecuador is to default officially on billions of dollars of foreign debt it considers "illegitimate", says President Rafael Correa.

Mr Correa said he had given the order not to approve a debt interest payment due on Monday, describing the international lenders as "monsters".

The Economist (January 2010):

To finance its budget, the [Ecuadorean] government is likely to have to borrow more than $4 billion this year. Sine defaulting on a third of its foreign debt in December 2008, it has scoured the world for cash, without much success. It was late in paying legislators' salaries last month.

Hah! Another Latin American country exhibiting the wonders (and the impossibility) of building a welfare state at the expense of free-market capitalism (or without free-market capitalism). Like Venezuela, another Latin American country run by a socialist madman, Ecuador went on a spending spree when the price of oil was high. Oil revenue was then allocated to social spending, i.e., buying votes and turning people dependent on the government. Anti-West rhetoric and threats to private companies have not exactly helped government finances, unless you count Hugo Chávez's support, which is not really a good bet in the long run.

Are greens simply evil?

They seem to be:

While mere exposure to green products may “prime” us to think about social consciousness and perhaps improve our behavior, if we actually buy a green product, we appear to take it as license to act like jerks.

Things got interesting when these students were subsequently given $6 for an economic task and asked to share it with an unknown partner. The students who had purchased products in the green store, it turned out, were far less generous with the $6 than students who had merely been exposed to the green products.

A subsequent experiment pushed things even further. Students were again asked to shop in a green or a conventional store. They were then put through an experiment where they had the opportunity to earn extra money by cheating — even to steal money from an envelope left in the room. Consistent with the previous experiment, participants who had purchased from the green store were significantly more likely to cheat and to steal than participants who purchased from the conventional store.

I'd draw a different conclusion than the one in the first paragraph. I don't think that buying green products makes you act like a jerk. Instead, it's the way the left-wing brain has been wired that makes you act like a criminal, a mentality of total disregard for the property and freedom of others. It doesn't surprise me in the least that a green person would steal the money from an envelope. These are the same people who see nothing wrong with high marginal tax rates. These are the same people who think it's acceptable to break store windows and burn cars of private individuals while demonstrating against government policies.

Galbraith

Now that Rajendra K. Pachauri, some IPCC hotshot, is marketing John Kenneth Galbraith, an economist who died some years back, it's quite fitting to post here something I wrote as part of an academic writing course last spring:

Galbraithian Ideas - a Renaissance

John Kenneth Galbraith, an American-Canadian economist who died in 2006, was and is better known for his books than for any actual research on economic matters. This is why his reputation is two-sided: On the one hand his ideas are popular especially on the left of the political spectrum but on the other hand as an economist he was not very remarkable. Paul Krugman, a Nobel-winning economist, was not happy with Galbraith’s apparent mainstream influence, calling Galbraith a “policy entrepreneur”. This, however, was in 1994 and anyone who has been reading Krugman’s NYTimes blog lately has surely noticed how Krugman now seems to have a more favorable opinion of Galbraith or at least of his opinions. The initial friction never seemed to make much sense: after all, both Galbraith and Krugman are Keynesian economists.

An interesting paper by L.A. Duhs poses a relevant question: Did Krugman come to accept Galbraith’s views as an economist or as a columnist with a political agenda? After all, Krugman had criticized Galbraith for offering “easy solutions where there are likely to be none” (Duhs 2). Is Krugman now imitating Galbraith by offering simple solutions to complex problems? A particularly interesting section in the paper explores how Krugman first criticized Galbraith’s vision of a future America in The New Industrial State where big corporations exercise monopoly power and act as price makers, i.e. are able to set prices due to the absence of competition. However, based on Krugman’s NYTimes columns it seems that he would now agree with Galbraith on issues of corporate power. We are left with an interesting question: Has Krugman progressed or regressed into a Galbraithian? (Duhs 4–6)

Economists, such as Milton Friedman, who have traditionally been associated with the political right, did not think much of Galbraith’s economic views either (Lockett 3). In a NYTimes blog post Barry Gewen observes that “When Milton Friedman’s stock is high, John Kenneth Galbraith’s is low, and vice versa.” At the moment it seems that Friedman’s (who once called Galbraith “a missionary seeking converts”) stock is low and Galbraith’s name is experiencing a renaissance. A new school of economics called behavioral economics which attempts to take a more “realistic” approach toward consumer behavior, expresses the view that consumers are not rational and that it should be up to economists to study how consumers actually behave (Duhs 18). This is in contrast with some neoclassical models which assume that utility-maximizing individuals are rational. Galbraith, a Keynesian, argued against this neoclassical assumption and against the assumption that, left to their own devices, markets would always strike a balance. In The New Industrial State he explained how market failures (which often result from government action) can lead to disproportionate corporate power. In The Great Crash, 1929 Galbraith criticized businesses for speculative, short-sighted behavior.

All these ideas are now resurfacing in a way that appears more populist than scientific. This is why it is important to remember that not much of Galbraith’s writings were based on hard research.

Dush, L.A. "From Galbraith to Krugman and Back." University of Queensland.
Galbraith, J.K. "Countervailing Power." The American Economic Review 44.2 (1954): 1-6.
Gewen, Barry. "The Return of John Kennety Galbraith." The New York Times. 17 December 2008.
Lockett, Peter. "Milton Friedman and Economic Policy." University of Adelaide.

Immigrants kill patients? Or the welfare model?

Mikko Ellilä reports that "Immigrant doctors kill Finnish patients" (originally covered by Iltalehti). Patients are having problems explaining their problems to doctors because there's a language barrier now. Because of a shortage of Finnish doctors, many immigrants have been hired as doctors lately. This is causing problems, some of them life-threatening. For example, a patient was given cough medicine when he was in fact having a heart failure. According to the news piece, these problems are increasing.

But this isn't an immigration-related problem; rather, it is a fundamental flaw of the welfare model. In the absence of market-determined prices, supply and demand are prevented from adjusting to an equilibrium (market clearing) level. In a market economy a shortage of doctors should lead to an increase in their salaries which in turn should encourage more people to seek medical education.

A common argument against the free-market solution is that people cannot afford market prices. But people forget that their disposable incomes are being eroded by the welfare model. When the government takes more than 50% of the money you make, it is no wonder people feel poor.

Jääkiekkoa suunnitelmatalouden ehdoin

Detroitissa viime kauden pelannut tshekkikiekkoilija Jiri Hudler on siirtymässä Venäjän KHL-liigaan. Ylen uutisen kommenttiosastossa nimimerkki Angels of LA kirjoitti:

Hieno juttu, että venäläisiltä löytyy nyt resursseja laittaa ylimieliselle NHL:lle kapuloita rattaisiin. Euroopasta on aina ryövätty huippupelaajat ja lupaavimmat lahjakkuudet naurettavilla rahasummilla Pohjois-Amerikkaan, milloin mihinkin farmiliigaan

Onpas tosi hienoa, että Venäjän umpimätä poliittinen koneisto on rasvannut venäläistä urheilua öljyrahoilla! Pitäisikö Suomessakin valtion kansallistaa yksityistä omaisuutta ja edistää paikallishallintojen korruptiota, jotta puolityhjille kiekkohalleille voitaisiin raahata miljoonia dollareita maksavia pelaajia?

Muutenkin on naurettavaa kuunnella joidenkin kiekkoeksperttien analyysia siitä, miten Venäjällä on jääkiekkoon liittyvät asiat "tehty oikein" viime vuosien aikana. Näille eksperteille jääkiekon tukeminen on jokin itseisarvo, vailla mitään vaihtoehtoiskustannuksia. Minun nähdäkseni jääkiekossa tehdään asiat oikein silloin, kun tarjonta vastaa yleisön kysyntää, mutta ei silloin, kun tuetaan sadoilla miljoonilla ruplilla toimintaa, josta kuluttajat eivät ole halukkaita maksamaan. Miksi siis Angels of LA puhuu "naurettavista rahasummista" viitatessaan NHL:ssä maksettaviin palkkoihin? NHL:n palkat sentään ovat lähtöisin yleisön halukkuudesta maksaa.

Vai edistääkö jääkiekon tukeminen hyvinvointia, mikä tietenkin oikeuttaisi kaikenlaisen totalitarismin? Ehkä Neuvostoliittokin teki jääkiekon suhteen "asiat oikein", kun miesten maajoukkueen pelaajavat harjoittelivat 11 kuukautta vuodessa eristyksissä perheistään.

Pohjoisamerikkalaisen jääkiekon ystävänä en voi toivoa muuta kuin että KHL romahtaisi omaan megalomaanisuuteensa. Toivoisin myös pelaajien boikotoivan kyseistä liigaa.

Rahapelimarkkinat ja paternalismi

Tanska aikoo liberalisoida rahapelimarkkinoita. Kun Suomessa yleensä seurataan muiden Pohjoismaiden esimerkkiä niin asiassa kuin asiassa, niin tässä olisi nyt kerrankin siihen aihetta. Valitettavasti Tanskan tapauksessa ei näytä olevan kyse rahapelimarkkinoiden täydellisestä liberalisoinnista, vaan Danske Spil -valtionyhtiön monopolioikeuksien rajaamisesta. Yhtiö siis näyttää jäävän valtion käsiin. Tätä perustellaan samanlaisilla argumenteilla kuin Veikkauksen tai Rayn monopolia Suomessa: Osa tuloista allokoidaan kaikenlaiseen yhteiskunnan hyvinvointia edistävään toimintaan. Miten valtio on tässä suhteessa kyennyt ottamaan valtionomistuksen vaihtoehtoiskustannukset ja monopolista aiheutuvat hyvinvointitappiot huomioon, sitä en tiedä. Kyllähän Neuvostoliitonkin talousjärjestelmällä oli jotakin näyttää.

Toinen argumentti rahapelimonopolin puolesta on pelaamisesta aiheutuvat yhteiskunnalliset haitat. Tämä on tietenkin arvokysymys, ja vasemmistolaiset mielipiteet kallistuvat rankasti paternalismin puolelle. Koska yksilöt ovat heikkoja, houkutuksille alttiita ja yhteiskunnan hyvinvointia ajattelemattomia, heidät pitää pakottaa toimimaan heidän omien etujensa mukaan (aivan kuin valtio tietäisi, mikä on yksilön etujen mukaista).

Rahapelimarkkinoilla olisi vapaassa markkinataloudessakin tärkeä sosiaalinen tehtävä: allokoida idioottien varoja parempiin käsiin, ja vielä täysin vapaaehtoisten transaktioiden kautta. Miksi tätä pitäisi pyrkiä vastustamaan?

Ranska ja taantuma

Taantuman vastaista taistelua Ranskassa:

Irtisanomisista suivaantuneet työntekijät laskivat myöhään torstai-iltana vapaaksi pomonsa, jotka he aiemmin päivällä sieppasivat.

...

Kyselyiden mukaan noin puolet kansasta hyväksyy johtajien sieppaukset, mutta yrittäjäjärjestöt vaativat hallitusta lopettamaan ne heti.

(Hieman enemmän tekstiä Wall Street Journalissa.)

Kysymys kuuluukin, mikseivät viranomaiset tehneet mitään? Eikö tässä olisi ollut homma RAID-erikoisjoukolle?

Tässä on tietenkin kyse siitä, että pienen ryhmän intressit ovat ristiriidassa talouden pitkän aikavälin tavoitteiden kanssa. Ranskassa työvoima ei ole yhtä järjestäytynyttä kuin Suomessa, mutta ay-liikkeet ovat silti hyvin vahvoja ja kykeneviä lamauttamaan talouden toimintaa. Laskusuhdanteessa talous hyötyy, kun hintatason annetaan sopeutua kitkattomasti. Esimerkiksi Amerikassa asuntojen hintojen lasku on hyvä edellytys asteittaiselle toipumiselle. Euroopassa ay-liikkeet kuitenkin ovat sen verran vahvoja, että taloudessa esiintyy merkittävää kitkaa, ja paluu "luonnolliseen" työttömyysasteeseen viivästyy useita vuosia, jos sitä ikinä saavutetaankaan.

Valtiovalta voi tietenkin pyrkiä heikentämään ay-liikkeitä. Näin tehtiin USA:ssa ja Britanniassa 80-luvulla. Ranskassa ongelmana on radikalismi, jolla on ollut merkittävä rooli sitten Ranskan vallankumouksen: Pieni liikehdintä kaduilla johtaa siihen, että päättäjät perääntyvät suunnitelmistaan. Sarkozyn tähän astinen kausi on toiminut erinomaisena esimerkkinä tästä, vaikka hän on joitain pieniä voittoja saavuttanutkin.

Myös yksityisten omistusoikeuksien kunnioitus on Ranskassa ollut vähäistä verrattuna muihin kapitalistisiin maihin. Ranskan vallankumous (Rousseau) asetti pienemmän merkityksen yksityiselle omaisuudelle kuin Amerikan vallankumous (Locke). Ranska on ollut hidas ja haluton oppimaan. Amerikan kasvaessa ja pysyessä kohtuullisen uskollisena liberaalidemokraattisille periaatteilleen, Ranska kärsi tuhoisista sodista ja johtajista, jotka pyyhkivät liberalismilla takapuoltaan. Amerikan pelastettua Ranskan toistamiseen maailmansodasta, Ranska alkoi painottamaan valtion roolia talouden ohjailussa (dirigisme). Valtiojohtoinen ohjailu tuli Ranskassa ja muissa Euroopan maissa viimeistään 80-luvulla osittain tiensä päähän, kun keynesiläinen talouspolitiikka lakkasi toimimasta oppikirjaesimerkkien (joita muuten vieläkin viljellään alkeiskursseilla) mukaan. Valtion talouspoliittinen rooli on kuitenkin säilynyt merkittävänä. Se mm. pyrkii aktiivisesti pitämään pystyssä yrityksiä ja teollisuutta, jonka olisi tullut kadota muualle jo vuosikymmeniä sitten haaskaamasta resursseja. Esimerkiksi autoteollisuus on saanut valtiolta runsaasti tukea.

Ranskassa, kuten monessa muussakin länsimaassa, kuvitellaan, että ongelmat johtuvat markkinataloudesta. Hyvinvointivaltio on esitetty kapitalismista irrallisena ilmiönä, ei kapitalismista riippuvaisena ilmiönä. Tämän lisäksi mm. Ranskassa taloustieteestä opetetaan jotain muuta kuin mainstream-versiota. Ei ihme, että siellä ammutaan jatkuvasti itseään jalkaan. Kuten ylläolevasta uutisesta käy ilmi, yli puolet ranskalaisista hyväksyy lainvastaisen toiminnan. Kaikki tämä siis pelkästään sen vuoksi, että Ranska voitaisiin säilyttää verraten tehottomana länsimaana.

Heinlein on value part 1

From Starship Troopers (the novel):

Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero. By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess, value zero. Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet.

These kitchen illustrations demolish the Marxian theory of value - the fallacy from which the entire magnificent fraud of communism derives - and to illustrate the truth of the common-sense definition as measured in terms of use.

...

"Value" has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human - "market value" is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average personal values, all of which must be quantitively different or trade would be impossible. -Mr. Dubois

Limits to Growth

Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is a scary book; not because of its predictions but because of its recommendations. Seriously, a global environmental collapse does not sound all that bad if the alternative is some communist dictatorship led by the kind of people (victims of the Fatal Conceit as Friedrich von Hayek would say) who wrote this book.

All the arguments in the book are based on a computer model. (This is the fatal conceit: that these Ph.Ds think they can first model and then guide the world with their expertise.) The first 200 pages are pretty tedious, going through various scenarios with a bit different variables and values each time. After this the book gets scary. The real agenda is revealed to be nothing but an attempt to control the world by controlling consumers via central planning. They never of course say it out loud but what else could they mean?

From page 240:

But what if the world's people decide to moderate not only their demand for children, but also their material lifestyles? What if they set tehmselves a goal of an adequate but not excessive standard of living? ... To achieve this change would mean that the globe's people establish their status, derive satisfaction, and challenge themselves with goals other than ever-increasing production and ever-accumulating material wealth.

Okay, it is very hard for me to believe that the authors believe even for a second that individuals around the world would somehow just choose to "moderate" their material lifestyles. Accumulating stuff may very well be a part of our biological makeup. This may be because, at least to any single individual, more is better since those with more are better positioned than those with less. This is hardly news to anyone. In this respect greed is an emotion that serves a biological purpose just like love, hate or some other emotion. Only a totalitarian dictatorship can "remove" this desire and it can do that by making it impossible to accumulate stuff. Remove restrictions and the people will tell you to go fuck that Little Red Book of yours.

... figure 7-2, shows a simulated world again with a desired family size of two and perfect birth control, and now also with a definition of enough. This world has decided to aim for an industrial output per capita level for everyone that is about 10 percent higher than the world average in the year 2000. [Boldface mine.]

This is their definition of an adequate but not excessive standard of living. Once again we're given a taste of the left's tendency to define what people really need. Shortly after this the authors try to convince the reader that "It does not necessarily mean that the population and economy are static or stagnant. They stay roughly constant in total size, the way a river stays roughly constant in volume, even though water is always running through it." Seriously, how are you planning on maintaining a certain level of income without extremely coercive measures? The authors would destroy the very mechanisms that could save us from environmental problems. Since the market economy would be the first to go in their new world order, market dynamism would no longer be the primary source of technological innovation.

In the authors' utopia the only place for innovation would be the government:

A sustainable society would be interested in qualitative development, not physical expansion. It would use material growth as a considered tool, not a perpetual mandate. Neither for nor against growth, it would begin to discriminate among kinds of growth and puposes for growth ... Before a sustainable society would decide on any specific growth proposal, it would ask what the growth is for, and who would benefit, and what it would cost, and how long it woud last, and whether the growth could be accomodated by the sources and sinks of the earth. Such a society would apply its values and its best knowledge of the earth's limits to choose only those kinds of growth that would serve important social goals while enhancing sustainability. Once any physical growth had accomplished its purposes, society would stop its pursuit.

By now you should get the idea. No doubt the authors would be among those making the decisions, consulting their computer models and "experts". Free market capitalism would cease to exist since growth is an automatic result of competition. To end competition, you must first end consumer choice since whenever a consumer makes a choice between two similar products, he encourages competition. What the authors seem to want is some kind of a huge gosplan responsible for resource allocation.

Here is some other creepy stuff from page 261:

Creativity is needed here to get beyond the narrow idea that some peple "create" jobs for others, and the even narrower idea that workers are simply costs to be cut. What is needed is an economic system that uses and supports the contributions all people are able to make, that shares work, leisure, and economic outputs equitably, and that does not abandon people who for reasons temporary or permanent cannot work ... People don't need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect ... Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs - for indendity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy - with material things is to set up and unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings.

Once again you can see how the left (this includes the green/eco movement) always knows what we really need. (An enormous car can, by the way, give you plenty of admiration and respect. Not that I'd know.)

The people who wrote this book are dangerous. The green movement is filled with people who believe that drastic measures must be taken to save the earth from man even if that means sacrificing individual liberty. Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update is nothing but a gigantic call for central planning and collectivism. The book is a bible for the eco movement just as Mein Kampf was/is to nazism.

But here's some funny-not-in-a-scary-way stuff from the book:

... Interior Secretary Donald Hodel [of the Reagan Administration] said in public [in 1987] that the ozone layer would be no problem if people would just wear broad-brimmed hats and sunglasses when they went outside.

Or just put on some Sunblock 5000:

Vääriä ratkaisuehdotuksia Afrikan ongelmiin

Yhä nälkäisemmäksi maailman ongelmien ratkaisemisen suhteen käyvä Martti Ahtisaari kritisoi nykyistä kehitysapupolitiikkaa. Uuden kehitysapupolitiikan painopisteeksi hän nostaisi koulutuksen:

- Vastaus on hyvin yksinkertainen. On keskityttävä työllistämään ja kouluttamaan nuoria. Tarjoamaan heille aidosti mahdollisuus kunnon työpaikkaan.

Ei ole mikään ihme, että hyvinvointivaltiossa kasvanut ehdottaisi jotain tuollaista. Täällähän yleisesti kuvitellaan, että kattava julkinen koululaitos on jokin Graalin malja, jolle kuuluu kiitos korkeasta elintasostamme eli siitä hyvinvoinnista. Näin ei tietenkään todellisuudessa ole, sillä nykyisen kaltainen, julkisen sektorin tarjoama koulutus on suhteellisen uusi tulokas markkinataloudessamme. Ennen teollista vallankumousta vuosittainen talouskasvu Euroopassa oli prosentin kymmenesosien luokkaa. Teollisen vallankumouksen seurauksena alettiin puhua jo kahden prosentin keskimääräisesti vuosittaisesta kasvuvauhdista. Suomessa (joka tuolloin kuului takapajuiseen Venäjän keisarikuntaan) tämä kehitys käynnistyi 1800-luvun lopulla markkinoiden liberalisoinnin myötä. Suomalaiset nauttivat suhteellisen korkeasta elintasosta jo kauan ennen kuin kukaan oli edes kuullut termiä hyvinvointivaltio.

Miljardien investoiminen afrikkalaisten koulutustason parantamiseen on hirveätä resurssien hukkaan heittämistä ja prioriteettien unohtamista. Vasta kun afrikkalaisissa valtioissa jyllää vapaa markkinatalous, on köyhien koulutuksen tukemisessa jotain järkeä. Koulutus ei johda niukkojen resurssien tehokkaaseen käyttöön.

YK:ssa vuonna 2000 hyväksytyt vuosituhattavoitteet tähtäävät äärimmäisen köyhyyden poistamiseen. Toistaiseksi on käynyt toisin. Iso pala monien Saharan eteläpuolisten valtioiden budjeteista lepää yhä kansainvälisen kehitysavun varassa.

Tämä toimiikin esimerkkinä moraalikadosta: Kun länsimaat syynäävät ilmaista rahaa korruptoituneille johtajille, he katsovat reformien olevan tarpeettomia; miksi parantaa paikallisia oloja, kun se johtaisi oman kukkaron autioitumiseen?

Köyhyyden poistamisessa on epäonnistuttu Afrikassa. Kiina on sen sijaan nostanut 300 miljoonaa köyhyydestä.

Tässä vaiheessa joku olisi voinut edes mainita vapaiden markkinoiden merkityksen. Monelta nähtävästi on unohtunut, että itsenäistyttyään moni afrikkalainen valtio valitsi Neuvostoliiton järjestelmän mallikseen. Maareformit sun muut sosialisoinnit johtivat sitten tietenkin miljoonia niittäneisiin nälänhätiin. Kiinassa vastaava kehitys johti kehitykseen kohti vapaampia markkinoita.

Kymmenen vuoden kuluessa maailman työmarkkinoille pyrkii 1,3 miljardia alle 30-vuotiasta nuorta, joista ImagineNations-järjestön arvion mukaan ainoastaan 300 miljoonaa kyetään työllistämään.

Kehitysapu onkin edesauttanut tätä kehitystä. Kun darwinististen paineiden ei anneta tehdä työtänsä, ylijäämäpopulaation ongelman täytyy näkyä jossakin eli lähinnä työttömyydessä, nälänhädissä ja sodissa.