thehoffmen

Here’s a recent post from slashdot:

“Stephen Hawking has traveled to South Africa in search of Africa’s Einsteins. The project will create Africa’s first post-graduate center for math and physics. The British government has unfortunately decided not to back the project, which is hoping to fight poverty by identifying the kind of talent that can create wealth.”

While noble (and sadly, Nobel worthy) this is unfortunately the *wrong* solution to the problem. The solution to poverty is global capitalism. Excellent, detailed moral, practical and philosophical arguments for this exist. If Stephen is serious about getting Africa out of poverty, he needs to engage in actively changing the governments of these countries from dictatorships, to free capitalist countries. There can be no wealth creation in a dictatorship. We see this every passing day in Venezuela, and Cuba is the poster child for this phenomena, as are the entire Eastern Block during the Soviet reign. Why do “smart” people have such a hard time with this point?

Just to be clear, you can’t change the government of a country in a vacuum, it requires a solid cultural shift to a culture that promotes and understands the sovereignty and power of the individual over that of the group. You can’t have a government claim to protect individual rights and individual freedoms in the context of ethnic, class and/or religious politics. So, in order to create a “lasting” governmental change, he needs to work on getting these countries to realize the power of individuals.  I don’t have the answer to that, because we need that in our country now.  Read all of the three texts above, and maybe you’ll figure out how, and start us down that road….?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 10:47 pm and is filed under Objectivism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.