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10A056 The Third World
by Jim Davies, 10/28/2010
Just occasionally, mainstream reporters are surprised by answers they get to questions, and it happened Tuesday evening on PBS' News Hour and they were honest enough not to edit-out the incident. The transcript is available here (scroll down 40%, or search for "14".) Jim Lehrer was asking a guest about the effect of the bag of Iranian cash, given to President Karzai, upon Afghan-US relations and the reply noted that "we" are spending $100 billion a year in a country whose GDP is only $14B. Lehrer stopped short; he clearly hadn't noticed that anomaly, and nor had I. It was an Aha! moment. It throws extra light on the utter absurdity of what's being done in the fair name of America. I don't know (and Lehrer didn't ask) whether that $14B did or did not include the approximately $1.5 billion (farm-gate prices) of heroin produced annually and somehow exported under the noses of a hundred thousand armed soldiers of the occupation. Here's a society so primitive that while fiercely defending its territory against three successive superpowers of their time (British, Soviet, American) it has never built sufficient prosperity to get itself even a decent set of roads or railways, producing only $467 worth of goods and services per year per capita (Americans produce $40,000) yet we and our children are being taxed to protect them against some of their own, to the tune of seven times as much. This is IDIOCY writ so large that one wonders whether even the morons of D.C. have noticed anything fundamentally stupid. Some statists might suggest better uses for the $100B; hand $7 to each Afghan for every $1 he earns and so transform his living standards. That would not work. Absent a true market of goods and services it would merely multiply the price of everything by eight. The economy has to be built, piece by piece, and that means help of a different kind. Investment (for profit, and some perhaps for the pleasure of providing it) in education, roads, railways, power, medicine, mines, farms. But even that misses the point: all the $100B/yr, presently, is stolen money.
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When our own society has rid itself of
government, each of us will retain our own honestly acquired
funds and spend or invest them as we individually wish. There
will be a rich set of opportunities, to return both hard profit
and the softer pleasure of seeing people lift themselves out of
poverty. However if those people still have a government - whose
first function is always to steal resources to fund its own
objectives - that will be a powerful disincentive to invest. Why
trust a known thief with a bag of money? - that is what keeps the
third world in poverty. Investors have the money, but they very
reasonably fear losing it to that third party.
Instead, with the total insanity of the statist paradigm, money
is stolen from those who do produce it, so impoverishing the donor,
then handed to governments in the poor country the thieves consider
"deserving", there to be squandered on