A Stitch in Haste

The New York Times:

When a once-in-a-century natural disaster swept away the lives of more than 100,000 poor Asians last December, the developed world opened its hearts and its checkbooks. Yet when it comes to Africa, where hundreds of thousands of poor men, women and children die needlessly each year from preventable diseases, or unnatural disasters like civil wars, much of the developed world seems to have a heart of stone.
...
[T]he continent's most troubled regions -- including Somalia and Sudan in the east, Congo in the center, Zimbabwe in the south and Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the west -- challenge not only our common humanity, but global security as well.

Let's review:

Somalia: Combination of former British and Italian colonies; independent since 1960.

Sudan: Former British colony; independent since 1956.

Congo (D.R.): Former Belgian colony; independent since 1960.

Zimbabwe: Former British colony; independent since 1980.

Ivory Coast: Former French colony; independent since 1960.

Sierra Leone: Former British colony; independent since 1961.

Liberia: Sui generis -- founded by the American Colonization Society in 1820; independent since 1847; continuous civil war since 1989; under United Nations auspices since 2003.

It's very convenient for the Times to invoke the responsibility of "the developed world" to resolve the Africa crisis. And of course people of good will throughout "the developed world" should and consistently do try to help the African people; the original "Band Aid" concert was held over twenty years ago.

But why is it that the so-called "Pottery Barn rule" only seems to apply to the United States? We're still paying for the sins of slavery and the Indian slaughter, and may very well continue to do so forever. But (Old) Europe gets a bye when it comes to Africa? They get to shuck off the sorrows of Africa to "the developed world" (meaning of course the U.S.)?

(Old) Europe got Africa into its current mess -- shouldn't it be (Old) Europe that bears the greatest responsibility for getting Africa out of it?

It seems that (Old) Europe -- and its apologists -- are trying to have it both ways.

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...so long as barbarism such as this is allowed to continue:

In the hours after James Mbewe was laid to rest three years ago, in an unmarked grave not far from here, his 23-year-old wife, Fanny, neither mourned him nor accepted visits from sympathizers. Instead, she hid in his sister's hut, hoping that the rest of her in-laws would not find her.

But they hunted her down, she said, and insisted that if she refused to exorcise her dead husband's spirit, she would be blamed every time a villager died. So she put her two small children to bed and then forced herself to have sex with James's cousin.
...
Here and in a number of nearby nations including Zambia and Kenya, a husband's funeral has long concluded with a final ritual: sex between the widow and one of her husband's relatives, to break the bond with his spirit and, it is said, save her and the rest of the village from insanity or disease. Widows have long tolerated it, and traditional leaders have endorsed it, as an unchallenged tradition of rural African life.

Now AIDS is changing that. Political and tribal leaders are starting to speak out publicly against so-called sexual cleansing, condemning it as one reason H.I.V. has spread to 25 million sub-Saharan Africans, killing 2.3 million last year alone.

Now, we're obviously a long way from "White Man's Burden" and no one wants to invite still more cries of "Western Imperialism" or "American Hegemony" or whatever hip expressions the kids are using these days.

Still, and with all due respect, somebody needs to grab a pledge paddle and start whacking these people on the behind with a loud "Stop That!"

Otherwise we're going to "respect" these "indigenous peoples" right into extinction.

And of course, while we're whacking bottoms, we need to line up the Catholic Church in Africa for extra special spankings for their medieval views on condoms.

The Global AIDS crisis shows no sign of improving:

The world will not meet its goal of halting and reversing the spread of AIDS in 10 years if the disease continues to race faster than efforts to stop it, a senior U.N. AIDS specialist said on Thursday.

Presidents and prime ministers, meeting at the United Nations nearly five years go, set a series of Millennium Development Goals, among them halting and beginning to reverse by 2015 the spread of AIDS and HIV, the virus that causes it.
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But some of the worst predictions have come to pass. Nearly half of those infected with HIV are women and girls, whether married or single, promiscuous or faithful.
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Worldwide, the U.N. report said, some $8 billion will be available in 2005 to fund programs in 135 low- and middle-income countries, a dramatic 23 percent increase over the previous year.
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The money comes mainly from the United States, which spent $2.4 billion last year, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria — an independent organization of governments, business and private groups first proposed by Annan four years ago.

If there can be such a thing as "peacetime war crimes," then most African heads of state and all Roman Catholic Cardinals should hang. It's bad enough to demand that your people live in ignorance and misery. Now they're demanding that they die in ignorance and misery. When will enough be enough?

And a million thanks to the pharmaceutical companies and their ("greedy") profit motive for having given the world AIDS drugs, and perhaps eventually a vaccine.

"The countries that are emerging are those that did not receive a lot of assistance. So the whole premise that providing more assistance is going to be the key to development doesn't prove to be true."
--Michael Clough, Africa expert, Human Rights Watch

Clough also emphasizes the reverse observation:

[T]he countries who received the most aid during the Cold War now have the biggest problems, with Liberia, Sudan and what is now called Congo, topping the list.

Suppose you have a dysfunctional person you are trying to help — say a drug addict. Do you simply throw money at her, hoping she'll elect to check herself into rehab? Or do you stage an intervention, using whatever motivation, or even coercion, that is required to get her to acknowledge that her way of doing things is simply wrong and untenable?

Enough is enough. No democracy? No free markets? No aid.

Call it an intervention. Call it the Politics of Fishing. Call it whatever you want.

Enough is enough.

UPDATE: Tom G. Palmer has more.

You know that East Africa is making progress in embracing economic development and capitalistic free markets when the beer starts flowing:

There was a time in Tanzania, having a beer with friends meant standing in line for hours. And even then you weren't guaranteed a drink.

Then the government began to remove decades-old state controls on the economy and privatize state-owned companies. Beer and other goods became more readily available and the government saved the $100 million it spent each year subsidizing state-owned companies.
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The East African country was a one-party state from independence from Britain in 1961 into the 1980s. It has since undertaken political and economic reforms, turning away from socialism that many African countries embraced after independence and embracing multiparty democracy.

A shining brewery on a hill...

Hopefully all the other basket cases in Sub-Saharan Africa will follow Tanzania's example and dump their juntas and doomed-to-fail socialist regimes.

I'll drink to that.

To review: Individual prices for individual goods and services are determined by individual demand and supply curves. An increase in the price of one good relative to other goods is not "inflation" -- it merely reflects shifting demand and supply curves.

True inflation -- a general and roughly proportional increase in all prices for all goods and services -- can only ever come about by government interference in the economy, typically by corrupting and debasing the money supply. And the only cure for true inflation is to stop the government interference / corruption and debasement of the money supply that created the inflation in the first place.

A most basic lesson forgotten or ignored by the tyrants of Zimbabwe:

The Zimbabwean government is to establish an official commission to monitor prices and incomes in the latest attempt to stall skyrocketing inflation, a government minister has said.
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Zimbabwe's economy has been on a downturn in the last five years characterised by runaway inflation which stood at 1,023.3 percent in September and perennial shortages of basic commodities such as cooking oil, fuel and the staple cornmeal.
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President Robert Mugabe's government first introduced price controls for selected goods four years ago to snuff out a burgeoning black market where scarce goods were sold for up to three times the state-imposed price.

The government occasionally deploys police to raid businesses and arrest price control violators who are usually released after paying a fine.

The planned law provides for the appointment of a commission "to monitor price trends of goods and services ... producing price monitoring reports and initiating corrective measures in cases of unscrupulous businesses affecting Zimbabwe's pricing system," according to a draft version of the bill.

Read that last sentence again: "unscrupulous businesses affecting Zimbabwe's pricing system." So, to the anti-capitalist dictators of this Third World disgrace of a country, setting a market-based price is now "unscrupulous" -- and criminal.

It's quite simple really: 1,000% inflation -- or 0.0001% inflation for that matter -- simply cannot be caused by businesses. No business, indeed no private person or entity of any kind, can "cause inflation." Only governments can cause inflation. Mugabe and his thugs are 100% (1000%?) responsible for his country's hyperinflation and the collapse of its economy.

Moreover, if the government replaces price-based rationing of scarce goods with a price-control system, then the rationing will simply occur via some other system. In centrally planned dictatorships, what other system tends to prevail? Does anyone doubt that Mugabe and his thugs get more than enough cornmeal?

And are our hack politicians any better when they decry the fiction of "price gouging" or insist that markets be disrupted "corrected" in contexts such as the minimum wage, municipal wi-fi or socialized medicine?

The laws of economics are simply not subject to repeal, by dictators or democracies.

Some bloggers, over my objections, blindly sided with Ethiopia when it invaded Somalia to fight sectarian Somali forces allied with al Qaeda. I, on the other hand, do not side with dictators -- even against terrorists.

Well, score one for me:

According to [Ethiopian dictator] Meles Zenawi, "neo-liberal" reforms pushed by the World Bank and other institutions in Africa have failed to "generate the kind of growth they sought."

"I believe in a strong developmental state," Meles [said] in an interview conducted in Addis Ababa.

"Developmental states do not intervene in the market in a wanton fashion. They intervene in the market to address pervasive market failures. It is a combination of market instruments and non-market instruments to optimise the outcome."

So that's the euphemism for a command-and-control economy these days: "strong developmental state." Someone tell Hugo Chavez.

Of course, history is replete with "strong developmental states" run by arrogant central planners: Stalin, Mao and Castro come to mind. Apparently Meles thinks he's on a par with those "reformers." For the sake of all Ethiopians, let's hope he's wrong.

A few hasty stitches:

--"Optimize the outcome"? To whom? By what standard?

--In sub-Saharan Africa, "non-market instruments" means guns. Always.

--The World Bank is not a "market reform" -- it is exactly the opposite: the central bankers of the developed world forcing their agenda onto the central bankers, or dictators, of the underdeveloped world. That is hardly a "market instrument," and it is exactly wrong to blame capitalism for the World Bank's failures.

--Similarly, economies like Ethiopia's are simply too small and too primitive to experience "pervasive market failures." Those failures are, inevitably, government failures, not market failures. What the basket case economies of Africa need is more capitalism, as much as possible, not authoritarian gobbledygook like "developmental states" and "non-market instruments."

--Guess who supports Meles wholeheartedly?

The prime minister also defended China's willingness to lend money to African states without demanding improvements in governance or other indicators, saying: "I think it would be wrong for people in the West to assume that they can buy good governance in Africa."

China demanding "good governance" from anyone would be the worst case of geopolitical nonsense since the Soviet Union "helped us" in World War II by declaring war on Japan -- two days after Hiroshima. China is, however, particularly interested in helping Ethiopia build up its telecommunications infrastructure -- maybe they can teach Meles how to censor the Internet.

Kip's Law: Every advocate of central planning always -- always -- envisions himself as the central planner.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged approaches later this week, behold a real-world collapse from the looters.

Reports from Zimbabwe say bakeries have run out of flour and there will be no bread in the foreseeable future.
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Last week, Zimbabwe's main bread producer Lobels Bread said it had scaled back its operations by 80% and had only two days' supply of flour left.

The AP news agency says stores across Zimbabwe are now telling customers that bread will not be available until further notice.

Mass starvation will not be far behind -- as will well-meaning but misguided humanitarian relief efforts that at best will keep Robert Mugabe in power that much longer.

In the Twenty-First Century, in what could easily be a perfectly functioning economy and in the absence of any natural disaster, armed thugs can still hijack an entire nation and loot central plan it to the point of mass starvation. The mind reels.

More:

Speaking last Thursday at the Zimbabwe Farmers' Union national congress in Masvingo Minister Gumbo said: "I am disappointed that our new farmers have proved to be failures since the start of the land reform programme in 2000."

"In spite of all the support government has been pouring into the agricultural sector, productivity and under-utilisation of land remain issues of concern," he added.

Food may grow on trees, but entrepreneurship and managerial talent do not. Stated differently, "give a man a fish" is not the same as "give a man a fishery." Especially when it's someone else's fishery that government looters stole at the point of a gun.

In Atlas Shrugged the men of the mind left of their own accord. In Zimbabwe they were forcibly evicted (or worse).

Either way, the same result: Total collapse.

Who is surprised, and who is not -- and what underlies the difference between them?

It depends on one's perspective:

Five thousand children die every day globally because they do not have access to clean toilets, health experts said on Tuesday.

Wealthy governments and donors could make a huge impact on global health by making sanitation a priority, representatives from a coalition of 60 health groups said. They estimated that 40 percent of the world's people do not have access to clean and safe toilets.
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WaterAid says 1.8 million children are dying each year before their fifth birthday from diarrhea.

Of course, to say that "diarrhea causes childhood deaths" and that "lack of toilets causes diarrhea" and even that "extreme poverty causes lack of toilets" is meaningless without the next question, the question omitted from the report: What causes extreme poverty?

And the answer to that question is self-evident: Lack of capitalism and liberty causes extreme poverty. These unfortunate little souls who are dying from diarrhea are, apart from a stray aberration here or there, not dying in the United States — or Canada or Australia or South Africa. The overwhelming majority — essentially all — infanticidal poverty occurs in nations where governments create poverty through anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, anti-libertarian regimes.

(The fact that water and sanitation can arguably be deemed legitimate public goods is besides the point. A government needs a prosperous economy — i.e., to modestly tax — in order to provide legitimate public goods. And "a prosperous economy" means capitalism, property and other individual rights, and democratic institutions. Wherever there is nationwide extreme poverty, those three pillars of civilization are invariably absent.)

---

Case study:

However, during the H.R. 2003 discussion forum there seemed to be a general assumption that Ethiopia is entitled to American aid. Throughout all the exploration of the various legal issues involved, no one ever doubted that the money belongs to the Ethiopian people. When I worked up the courage to mention the issue, I was rather strongly told that America has a moral obligation to provide assistance to Ethiopia.

H.R. 2003 (Ethiopia Democracy and Accountability Act of 2007) is an "oppressive" piece of legislation that would require Ethiopia (one of those sanitation-deficient infanticidal extreme poverty nations) to address certain well-documented human rights violations by the regime of its dictator, Meles Zenawi, if it is to continue receiving U.S. taxpayer dollars.

More:

Because all of the instructors at Ethiopian universities are made to sign a contract that we will never say anything against the government or ruling party, I had been very careful in wording my assignment. I asked the students to select a human rights issue in Ethiopia (making sure not to imply that there are any actual problems, just issues) and find another country dealing with that same situation.
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Out of the hundred third-year students I teach, probably forty of them had inserted a special section, right after the cover page, warning me of what might happen to them were their paper to leave my hands.

With all due empathy for Ethiopia's diarrhetic babies, there is clearly a bigger problem here than "no toilets."

A chicken in every hovel?

The Zimbabwean government unveiled plans on Tuesday to open a network of state-run "people's shops" that will offer basic goods at rock bottom prices in the run-up to elections in March.

But economists warned that the scheme would do nothing to improve the country's economic crisis and might even make it worse in the long term.

How reassuring that modern Western democracies don't do that sort of thing. Right?

Get ready for a typical African bloodbath:

ITEM: Don't Ask, Just Tell —

A top Zimbabwe Army general called on the nation's soldiers to vote for President Robert Mugabe in a runoff or resign from the military, the official state newspaper reported Saturday.

Note that this announcement has nothing to do with sending a message to soldiers and everything to do with sending a message to the people the soldiers will be shooting at: We control the army, so we control the election.

ITEM: And if you don't want to use the army to rig an election, you can always use the police:

The leader of a rebel faction of Zimbabwe's Movement for Democratic Change became the most senior opposition politician to be arrested Sunday when he was held over a written attack on Robert Mugabe.

Arthur Mutambara, who recently pledged to work again with main MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai to defeat President Mugabe at a run-off election this month, was picked up at his home in Harare, his party and lawyer said.
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The editor of the country's only independent Sunday paper The Standard was arrested last month over the piece written by Mutambara which accused Mugabe of running down the Zimbabwean economy and his security forces of abuses.

Arrested for an op-ed? China's communists would be impressed.

ITEM: Another option is of course to just plain starve the opposition to death:

Zimbabwe's government has banned at least one international aid group from operating in the country for allegedly campaigning for the opposition.

All operations of Care International are now suspended, pending an inquiry into the claims. Care denies that it "has encouraged or tolerated any political activity".
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Addressing the UN food summit in Rome, Mr Mugabe said the West, led by the former colonial power in Zimbabwe, Britain, was plotting to effect "illegal regime change" against him.

The report also describes a prosecution of three Sky News reporters from South Africa for "unaccredited journalism." Insists the magistrate overseeing the trial: "This country is not a banana republic."

Of course it isn't — that would require actually having bananas. Zimbabwe, under its jackboot thug regime, has none — nor any other food. To maniacs like Mugabe, it is better to rule a wasteland than not rule a free and prosperous society.

LATE ENTRY: Mugabe has, unsurprisingly, simply cut to the chase and arrested his opponent.