Charities Destroy Bike Business in Africa

I guess giving away free used bicycles is the new imperialism. USA once gave away fighter jets. How far done we've come. A week or so ago I blogged about the bicycle millionaire who was setting up a semi-charity to distribute bikes. His inspiration was the carcasses of disposed of bicycles along roads in Africa. There were no parts or repair facilities for bikes. So when broken, bikes are discarded. Now I see my Parish is working up a bike-donation scheme for Africa too.

Who benefits from bikes leaving USA? I heard BMW maintains their high resale value for their cars by taking in and shipping some units to South America to keep a balanced scarcity enough to maintain high resale prices. The net cost of the program is more than made up for in higher BMW prices all along the USA BMW supply chain. Used bikes leaving usa makes the price of new bikes higher.

And who believes these bikes will magically end up in anyones hands for free? For the bikes to get into the countries, they have to go through govt channels and checks. These are all run by Harvard educated minions of USA imperialism who will exact a high price for these bikes.

This program will ruin African bike merchants. What is your job? Are you in insurance, furniture or have a restaurant? What if Africans decided there was not enough of what you offered in USA, and decided to ship it in for free to help out? What if insurance, furniture of food could be had for free, compliments of Africa? What would happen to your business. Struggling African bike merchants will not be pleased by USA "charity."

Africans don't need free bikes. They need freedom to contract, with reliable banks, so they know if they earn money banks won't just steal it. HSBC is in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, so Georgians are enjoying trustworthy, reliable banking.

And far more important, Africans need freedom from kleptocratic govts, backed by usa kleptocrats. Trustworthy banking is necessary, but not sufficient. Africa, like USA, also need freedom from kleptocratic govt. No point in opening banks where government is just going to steal all of the producers money. No point in keeping banks where the government is just stealing all the producers money.

Bikes are old technology. What makes us think, that given the chance, Africans would not just skip old technology? Mongolians, in the 80's when they had relative freedom, did not buy up used, defunct usa telephones systems, they skipped that technology and went straight to cell phones. If Africans had freedom, we could expect them to skip bikes, and internal combbustion engine, and go straight to mag lev.

We cannot have mag lev becuase our regime is based on internal combustin engine. I think it was Emerson who complained (referring to the usa war between the states) that it took so few people to get democracy into a war. Those few people who got usa in continuous war have their wealth based on internal combustion engine. USA will end before that changes. (USA as we know it will end because that will not change.)

Free Africans may decide that a finite series of explosions to gain transportation (internal combustion) is not as good as the permanent continuous propulsion that comes from two magnets resisting each other (mag lev).

WE can't have that. So our response is to ship Africans our used bikes, and call it charity.

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