More on Altruism

I like Forbes magazine for the same reason I like reading Marxists: they get their facts straight. Forbes usually gets the analysis right too. Their emphasis on small business is useful to me, with interesting stories. Last week I was slamming altruism in business, and this week's Forbes has a bicycle international businessman who says:

You can have all of the goodwill in the world but if what you are doing isn't driven by the invisible hand of Adam Smith, you're doomed to fail

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I think he means the point I often make, business itself is "charity enough," that is, business itself provides the basic needs for people. The problem that results in the any lack these people experience is they are oppressed by too much government. In these African countries, in an attempt to be modern and western, they lay on a huge government, which militates against any growth, since such government is necessarily confiscatory. IN these african countries often it costs more to collect taxes than the taxes themselves bring in. And this is not limited to Africa, in all cultures at all times, when the people are not allowed to keep the fruits of their labors, they reduce their efforts to subsistence levels.

And what is the point of supporting an honest banking system if whatever you deposit will be stolen by bankers or taxes anyway?

These countries form by Western selected elites, who attend our prestigious colleges, and then go back to positions of commanding height in their economies, and liaise with their cohort from the same colleges, to oppress and exploit their own people. The people of these lands do not need free bicycles, they need freedom from oppression, freedom to contract. Give them that freedom, they will do as well as any other people.

Now of course the unstated premise is "Africans are not capable of self-rule." I think most people believe this. But there is nothing said about Africans, nor arguments or evidence martialed, that was not commonly said about the Irish less than 100 years ago. What happened? Freedom.

Charity is very hard to do. Free markets do not solve all problems, only the problem of scarcity. Religion solves problems of the soul, philosophy problems of the mind. Charity, an act of altruism, has a place when a person is jammed up due to no fault of his own. Charity is best one on one. But charity should not show up where markets will do the trick. There Freedom needs be.

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