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JUST
MY OPINION
Capitalism
Is the Cure for Africa's
Problems
It is capitalism that enabled the West to rise to great prosperity.
By Andrew Bernstein
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 17th century,
only 58 percent reached their 15th birthday, and life expectancy was
20. 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
capitalism).
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.
Andrew
Bernstein, Ph.D. in philosophy and author of The Capitalist Manifesto,
is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute (http://www.aynrand.org/)
in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand,
author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
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