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.
The opinions expressed in
this column represent those of the author and do not necessarily reflect
the opinions, views, or philosophy of TheRealityCheck.org, Inc.
