Africa's Lesson for NC
North Carolina won’t become a better place to live or work by trying to change the fundamental character of North Carolinians.
RALEIGH (By John Hood, Carolina Journal Online) – Greg Mills, who directs the Brenthurst Foundation in South Africa, has just published an essay on a subject in which I have long been interested: Why is Africa poor?
The usual explanations offered by the usual suspects don’t wash. Africa isn’t poor because it lacks raw materials. Africa is a treasure trove of raw materials. The continent isn’t poor because of the ravages of the African slave trade, which ended generations ago, or even of European colonialism, which had a longer hold on other regions of the developing world such as South Asia that have had great economic success in recent decades.
Racist cranks expose their idiocy by insisting that Africa is poor because its people are inherently inferior. The only clearly inferior people I know are racist cranks. And socialist cranks expose their idiocy by insisting that Africa is poor because of the defects of international capitalism, the spread of which has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in East Asia, South Asia, and Latin America during the same period that Africa has stagnated.
If it isn’t geography, history, exploitation, genetics, or the spread of capitalism that explains Africa’s heartbreaking poverty, what does?
RALEIGH (By John Hood, Carolina Journal Online) – Greg Mills, who directs the Brenthurst Foundation in South Africa, has just published an essay on a subject in which I have long been interested: Why is Africa poor?
The usual explanations offered by the usual suspects don’t wash. Africa isn’t poor because it lacks raw materials. Africa is a treasure trove of raw materials. The continent isn’t poor because of the ravages of the African slave trade, which ended generations ago, or even of European colonialism, which had a longer hold on other regions of the developing world such as South Asia that have had great economic success in recent decades.
Racist cranks expose their idiocy by insisting that Africa is poor because its people are inherently inferior. The only clearly inferior people I know are racist cranks. And socialist cranks expose their idiocy by insisting that Africa is poor because of the defects of international capitalism, the spread of which has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in East Asia, South Asia, and Latin America during the same period that Africa has stagnated.
If it isn’t geography, history, exploitation, genetics, or the spread of capitalism that explains Africa’s heartbreaking poverty, what does?
posted by BP News Bureau | 12:15 PM
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