The Golden Gate

Via LGF:

The Other Jihad by Ralph Peters is dubbed a “must read” by Charles Johnson. I am inclined to agree–especially if you are unclear that we are at war and that that war goes way beyond Iraq, IEDs, and Humvees:

The mosque stood empty beside the road in a Christian town in Kenya. Funded by Saudis, it wasn’t meant for worshippers. It was meant to stake a claim.

The mosque annoyed the locals. Windows were broken. A goat grazed in the garbage-speckled yard. Yet that shabby mosque was part of an extremist campaign that threatens widespread strife in the years ahead.

On a trip to Kenya and Tanzania last month, I saw recently built mosques wherever I went. Even along the predominantly Muslim coast, there were far more mosques and madrassahs than the worshippers needed. I counted seven mosques along one street in a Mombasa slum - most of them new but neglected.

The construction boom is part of what my personal observation convinces me is “the other jihad,” the slow-roll attempt by fundamentalists from the Arabian Peninsula to reclaim East Africa for the faith of the Prophet. We dismiss Osama bin Laden’s dream of re-establishing the caliphate, Islam’s bygone empire, as madness. But Saudis, Yemenis, Omanis and oil-rich Gulf Arabs are every bit as determined as bin Laden to reassert Muslim domination of the lands Islam once ruled.

Capitalism is the Cure. Here is two-thirds of the article:

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.

And from Dr Thomas Sowell:

“Forgiveness” of foreign debts is always high on the agenda of those on the political left.

At any given moment, this would of course free up money that African governments could spend to help relieve their people’s distress — assuming that this is what they would spend it for. But why would anyone think that promoting irresponsible government borrowing by periodically “forgiving” their debts is going to help African countries in the long run?

As for the people of Africa, they have to survive in the short run in order to get to the long run. So emergency aid for emergency conditions makes far more sense than long-run “foreign aid” programs with an almost unbroken track record of failure, not only in Africa but around the world.

Years ago, a courageous economist in India pointed out that, however helpful it was to receive food from abroad during India’s famines, the long-run policy of continually giving wheat to India was just reducing the ability of Indian farmers to grow wheat and sell it for a price that would cover their costs.

Eventually the policy of continually dumping wheat into India was stopped and today India produces so much wheat that it has been able to send some to Africa to deal with African famines.

Promoting dependency and irresponsible borrowing is not the way to help the poor internationally any more than these are ways of helping the poor at home. Such policies benefit the bureaucracies that administer foreign aid and enable vain people to see themselves as saviors, even when they are doing more harm than good.

From Walter Williams:

Did you learn that the United States is rich because we have bountiful natural resources? That has to be nonsense. Africa and South America are probably the richest continents in natural resources but are home to the world’s most miserably poor people. On the other hand, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and England are poor in natural resources, but their people are among the world’s richest.

Maybe your college professor taught that the legacy of colonialism explains Third World poverty. That’s nonsense as well. Canada was a colony. So were Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. In fact, the richest country in the world, the United States, was once a colony. By contrast, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tibet, Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan were never colonies, but they are home to the world’s poorest people.

There’s no complete explanation for why some countries are affluent while others are poor, but there are some leads. Rank countries along a continuum according to whether they are closer to being free-market economies or whether they’re closer to socialist or planned economies. Then, rank countries by per-capita income. We will find a general, not perfect, pattern whereby those countries having a larger free-market sector produce a higher standard of living for their citizens than those at the socialist end of the continuum.

What is more important is that if we ranked countries according to how Freedom House or Amnesty International rates their human-rights guarantees, we’d see that citizens of countries with market economies are not only richer, but they tend to enjoy a greater measure of human-rights protections. While there is no complete explanation for the correlation between free markets, higher wealth and human-rights protections, you can bet the rent money that the correlation is not simply coincidental.

Read all three.