[IMC-Editorial] Op-Ed on Bush's Visit to Africa

[The Ayn Rand Institute]

Dear Editor, 

Please consider this Op-Ed submission from the Ayn Rand Institute.

CAPITALISM IS THE CURE FOR AFRICA'S PROBLEMS

By Andrew Bernstein

As President Bush visits five African countries this week, a specter
haunts the continent--the specter of starvation. At least 2.5 million
Zambians currently face famine, as do millions more across southern
Africa--in Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The United Nations
estimates that more than 14 million Africans face possible starvation
by March 2003.

According to the comprehensive 2001 Index of Economic Freedom,
sub-Sahara Africa "remains...by far the poorest...area in the world."
In Ethiopia, per capita GNP is estimated at $108. In Sierra Leone the
figure is $146; in Mozambique $178; in Tanzania $180.  By contrast,
the per capita GNP in the United States exceeds $30,000.

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 that the West has? Capitalism. It is capitalism
that enabled the West to rise to great prosperity. The lack of
capitalism is responsible for Africa's crushing poverty.
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. 

Capitalism is a social system based on individual rights, the right of
every individual to his life, his liberty 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 kings, 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 the 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 and respect for individual rights. And to accomplish that, it
first needs to remove the philosophic shackles and replace tribal
collectivism with a philosophy of reason and freedom. The truly
humanitarian system is not the Marxism espoused by Western
intellectuals but the only system that can establish, as it
historically has, the furtherance of life on earth: capitalism.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Bernstein, Ph.D. in philosophy, is a senior writer for the Ayn
Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif.  The Institute promotes Objectivism,
the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The
Fountainhead.

If you plan to use this Op-Ed, please send an email to
media at aynrand.org with your publication's name and the expected date
of publication.

Thank you,


David Holcberg
Media Department, Ayn Rand Institute 
2121 Alton Parkway Suite 250
Irvine, CA 92606
Phone: (949) 222-6550 ext. 226
E-mail: davidh at aynrand.org

If you wish to have your email REMOVED from this list, please hit
reply and type REMOVE in the subject line. Thank you.