What Would Constitute a "Meager Lifestyle"?

[Montegriffo]

So the US is already well behind the target and you want to reduce it further?

Why do you insist on proselyting your socialist religion to us liberty folks. You live your lives, we'll live ours. If you don't like it, get the EU army to invade us and be like you.

"If what other people think makes any difference to you then they control your life, you don't." - me

"It is possible to be a humanitarian without being a socialist" -me

[Martin Hash]

Cool. Liberty allows people to get their jollies any way they want. Just don't expect to masturbate with my lotion.

[Speaker to Animals]

It doesn't work, though. We have dumped billions and billions of dollars into Africa with really no effect. The money should be tied to obligations to reform institutions such that they become productive rather than extractive, and to reform the governments therein, but the rulers will never agree to that.

So what you really do is maybe feed people a little, but you enrich the rulers, with all of our tax dollars.

Africans are tribal people. You can't just expect them to suddenly create high-trust, high technology societies because you waltzed in and snapped your fingers. They are not European people and you shouldn't expect them to be.

[Martin Hash]

Here's my personal analysis of Africa: What About Africa?

[Montegriffo]

It doesn't work, though. We have dumped billions and billions of dollars into Africa with really no effect. The money should be tied to obligations to reform institutions such that they become productive rather than extractive, and to reform the governments therein, but the rulers will never agree to that.

So what you really do is maybe feed people a little, but you enrich the rulers, with all of our tax dollars.

Africans are tribal people. You can't just expect them to suddenly create high-trust, high technology societies because you waltzed in and snapped your fingers. They are not European people and you shouldn't expect them to be.

Not no effect, sure the corruption in Africa means that a lot of the money goes to the wrong places but improvements in medical care, education and simple things like clean drinking water have made vast improvements to the lives of Africans.
You also have to balance the increase in refugees if those camps in Lebanon and other places like them stop receiving aid money.

[Speaker to Animals]

It doesn't work, though. We have dumped billions and billions of dollars into Africa with really no effect. The money should be tied to obligations to reform institutions such that they become productive rather than extractive, and to reform the governments therein, but the rulers will never agree to that.

So what you really do is maybe feed people a little, but you enrich the rulers, with all of our tax dollars.

Africans are tribal people. You can't just expect them to suddenly create high-trust, high technology societies because you waltzed in and snapped your fingers. They are not European people and you shouldn't expect them to be.

Not no effect, sure the corruption in Africa means that a lot of the money goes to the wrong places but improvements in medical care, education and simple things like clean drinking water have made vast improvements to the lives of Africans.
You also have to balance the increase in refugees if those camps in Lebanon and other places like them stop receiving aid money.

While I think the sentiments are in the right place, I also think the longterm consequences of such aid only make the situation much worse. Fertility is connected to food yields, and by artificially inflating a tribal society's food yield, you increase their population. But there exists no social framework to support the higher population. Thus such efforts result only greater dependency upon the developed world.

The mistake lies in assuming the developed world became developed by accident. It's only European and East Asian peoples who have done this. For Africans to get to where we are today would take centuries of a state attempting to stamp out tribalism as we did in the high middle ages, and China did after the warring states period.

This might represent one of the greatest flaws in liberal thought over the past sixty years or so. We see similar patterns here in America. For instance, in the 1960s, single motherhood was almost nonexistent. We rightly looked down on such a lifestyle because it typically results in social degeneration, crime, and poor life outcomes for the children. Then we started to subsidize it with welfare and food assistance. The argument was initially sound. Who would want to let these women and their children go hungry? But as we did this, more women decided to take that path. More and more people became totally dependent upon that system. Now we have a welfare system that not only harms us economically, but results in much of the crime, drug abuse, and social decay we suffer from today. Worse, single mothers now represent almost half of all family units now because of these policies. Cutting them off now results in even more enormous suffering. So here we are perpetuating it, subsidizing it, and getting so much more of it that a reasonable person could project that most families will be single mother households in the near future, with all the problems that will come with that state of affairs. Cutting them off now seems almost unthinkable because of the numbers of women and children dependent on this system. But the longer we go on like this, the more unthinkable it gets. This is the welfare trap.

What happens in Africa cannot even compare to what we have done to our societies. We basically do the exact same thing to their entire society rather than just some demographic within it. Women in the West have a choice to bear children out of wedlock, destroy their marriages, and become net losses for society. Nobody has that choice in Africa. When you flood markets with food, you wipe out local farmers. Even the self-sufficient become dependent on the foreign food shipments. Meanwhile, our policies tend to reinforce despotic, tribal regimes.

Thank God nobody did that to our people in the middle ages, else we'd never have accomplished what we did.

[DrYouth]

A better welfare system is like an economic hospital. It's purpose should be to identify what went wrong, fix the underlying causes, and get people back to self-sufficiency.

If there do not exist enough jobs right now, then one solution would be to establish homestead communities and get a lot of these people into those areas where their labor actually goes towards sustaining them.

But, honestly, economically, we have to change the system. The idea that the people who have the capital to control the capital goods should get the lion's share of the surplus is not going to work when there does not exist enough jobs for a substantial percentage of the population. Obviously various forms of marxism and socialism do not work. We need something else.

Speaker to Animals at his best...

I agree with all of this... especially the "better welfare system" proposal...
I would love to see this done well.
It would be worth every penny invested in it.

[Martin Hash]

Speaker, very convincing argument about Africa.

[Speaker to Animals]

Or a simpler way to put it:

By artificially inflating food yields in human populations who did not yet escape the Malthusian Trap, you allow them to grow populations on the order of the developed human populations who did escape it, but without any of the underlying genetic, social, and economic changes that made such a transition possible.

It's a dangerous game to play with the fate of other peoples. Really, it's a game the left and the globalists in general have been playing nonstop across the board to great human suffering in recent years. We should allow the rest of the world to develop according to their own destinies.

I think the underlying error behind this kind of thinking stems from the idea that humans are interchangeable. The capitalist and marxist economists both see humans as cogs in machines, totally replaceable. But the obvious facts of the world and of history contradict that thesis entirely.

[Martin Hash]

Again, nicely done.