Political and miscellaneous commentary by Orat.

Thursday, September 29, 2005

The Root of Poverty and Wealth

Today I received a news alert by e-mail that mentioned a project to develop a laptop that costs only $100. I was immediately interested and clicked to view the article. Much to my dismay, however, I found that this was yet another example of a brilliant mind wasted in pursuit of misguided, utopian fantasies.

As I learned, Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has embarked upon a plan to develop a $100 laptop, not so that he can realize an entrepreneurial dream of profits and success or bring an affordable laptop to the mass-market, but ostensibly so he can do his bit to help so-called “developing nations.”

Operating under the name “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC), Negroponte plans to partner with repressive governments such as those of Communist China and Brazil to provide laptops to those countries’ students. I can only assume that he believes, like many people, that by placing high-tech computers into the hands of those in poorer nations, it will contribute toward an automatic lifting of that country out of poverty and into the modern industrial age.

Indeed, Mr. Negroponte is only one of a legion of hopelessly deluded do-gooders, such as those affiliated with the “Live 8” and ONE.org programs, all of whom mistakenly believe that if we could all just shovel enough money and resources to these dysfunctional nations, they’ll somehow magically come into the 20th Century (and perhaps the 21st someday afterward). Never mind the fact that nobody had to shovel any such resources to lift freer Western nations to their present heights.

The problem here is a fundamental misunderstanding of the root of poverty and wealth.

Poverty is a natural state. That is to say, nature does not furnish Man with the things necessary to his survival automatically. This state of natural poverty can only be overcome by the application of Man's mind – his primary and only means of survival. For Man's mind to work at its best requires freedom. This is why we don't see engineers in totalitarian countries (such as North Korea) coming up with brilliant designs for revolutionary laptops to start distributing to the rest of the world, but we do see them in (relatively) free countries.

Simply giving wealth over to impoverished countries will not help them in the least. Poverty and wealth are effects, not root causes. Thus the cause of poverty cannot simply be a lack of wealth. The root cause of these countries' poverty is their lack of freedom, and therefore no amount of aid or generosity will solve their fundamental problem. Until the issues of freedom and individual rights are addressed in these nations, all such benevolence will be throwing money down a black hole – or much worse.

If you doubt any of this, look at the decades and decades wherein huge sums of international aid that have been repeatedly heaped upon such countries. Observe that, for the most part, it has always been the same countries receiving such aid over the decades. This aid has accomplished nothing and only serves to further entrench the oppression there by sheltering such regimes from the natural consequences of their policies. By aiding and abetting these regimes in their endeavor to evade the inevitable reality of their policies, Mr. Negroponte and his ilk have become willing accomplices to the continued oppression.

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