Make Poverty History is the latest manifestation of the rich helping the poor. But what lies behind the urge to do good to others while expecting nothing in return? In Night Waves: Undercurrents, Philip Dodd and guests deconstruct the philosophy, morality and practicality of altruism. Duration: 45 minutes
"We are all here to help others. What I can't figure out is what the others are here for." So wrote W.H. Auden. In this evening's Night Waves: Undercurrents, Philip Dodd and guests will consider the subject of altruism.
When the Asian tsunami devastated millions of lives six months ago, individuals and governments around the world donated money and effort in almost unprecedented quantities. And with Live8 and the G8 summit about to take place, attention will once again focus on aid to Africa.
But what lies behind an individual's desire to help others in a selfless way? Auguste Comte, the French founder of positivism, believed that individuals have a moral obligation to serve the interest of others, even at one's own cost. Yet the writer Ayn Rand challenged both philosophical and conventional ethics and presented strong arguments against altruism in its various forms. And to what extent is the concept of altruism an evolutionary trait?
Philip Dodd will be joined round the table by the eminent evolutionary biologist and author of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins; Frances Cairncross, former senior editor at The Econiomist; theologian Phillip Blond; and on the line from Geneva, Hugo Slim, specialist from the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, who has spent many years working for a variety of charities across the world. So, is selflessness really possible? Join Philip Dodd for Night Waves: Undercurrents live at half past nine here on Radio 3.
Jun 26, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
FoxNews reported last week: House Passes Flag-Burning Amendment and Dems Fear Flag-Burning Debate.
Mark Steyn writes: Don't worry, Old Glory can take the heat.
For my own part, I believe that, if someone wishes to burn a flag, he should be free to do so. In the same way, if Democrat senators want to make speeches comparing the U.S. military to Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, they should be free to do so. It's always useful to know what people really believe.
Jun 23, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
IRVINE, CA--In order to do business in China, several well-known U.S. companies have agreed to block certain "offensive" words, e.g., freedom, for China's communist censors. Important as it is to condemn these companies, it is even more important to applaud the well-known U.S. companies that refuse to help China kill freedom.
"Congratulations to Time, USA Today, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal for their courageous support of freedom of speech; and shame on Microsoft, Yahoo and Google for their betrayal of this crucial value--the very value that makes their own existences possible," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute.
Brook noted that "those who kowtow to the communist censors will no doubt say they have to obey the laws of the countries where they do business. But why do they have to do business there? They will argue that leaving the vast Chinese market to foreign competitors will only hurt America economically--and kill any opportunity they might have to promote free speech in China. But was CNN able to promote free speech in Iraq when, all those years prior to the war, it prostituted itself to the censors of the mass murderer Saddam Hussein? How do you promote free speech by being complicit in its suppression?
"Time, USA Today, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal didn't grovel for business: they have policies--and principles--against submitting to censorship. Their principled stand deserves our recognition."Jun 21, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
Useful reading on Africa for advocates of "One":
Capitalism Is the Cure for Africa's Problems by Andrew Bernstein
Africa needs to remove its political and economic shackles and replace them with political and economic freedom.
Africa: A Tragic Continent by Walter Williams
Poverty is not a cause but a result of Africa's problems.
Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa by Keith Richburg
Keith Richburg, an Award winning Journalist for the National Post, has heard all the stories about the supposed reasons for the ongoing chaos that still sweeps most of the African continent -- he's been educated about the consequences of white colonialism, the rape of Africa's natural resources, the time that's still required to for all of this to be overcome, etc., ad nauseam. At one time he unquestioningly believed all of the excuses. But after years of close-up scrutiny, living in the heartlands of several nations, he's not buying it. He has watched firsthand the rape of the African continent by its own sons, who should know better. To quote Rochburg, "Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers, and I'll throw it back in your face, and then I'll rub your nose into the images of the rotting flesh."
The Solution to Africa's Problems is Not Socialism But Freedom by Walter Williams
Evidence shows that no amount of IMF, World Bank and other handout interventions can bring prosperity to repressive nations. Only Africans can solve Africa's problems.Jun 20, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
From AP: White House Castigates Durbin For Remarks.The White House and Senate Republicans on Thursday assailed a Democrat for comparing American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis, Soviet gulags and Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot.
It is "beyond belief" that Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin would compare the treatment of dangerous enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay to the death of millions of innocent people by oppressive governments, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. ...
Defending himself, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat said Thursday it was "just plain wrong" to say he was diminishing past horrors.
He said he was comparing interrogation techniques that the FBI report said were used at Guantanamo with those in foreign detainee camps. ...
"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings," Durbin said Tuesday.
Michelle Malkin has many related links here, here, here, and here, including this one from the Los Angeles Times: We Are Our History -- Don't Forget It.Ignorance of history destroys our judgment. Consider Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), who just compared the Guantanamo Bay detention center to Stalin's gulag and to the death camps of Hitler and Pol Pot -- an astonishing, obscene piece of ignorance. Between 15 million and 30 million people died from 1918 through 1956 in the prisons and labor camps of the Soviet gulag. Historian Robert Conquest gives some facts. A prisoner at the Kholodnaya Gora prison had to stuff his ears with bread before sleeping on account of the shrieks of women being interrogated. At the Kolyma in Siberia, inmates labored through 12-hour days in cheap canvas shoes, on almost no food, in temperatures that could go to minus-58. At one camp, 1,300 of 3,000 inmates died in one year.
The title of this cartoon comes from this Investor's Business Daily editorial, which states:Among his complaints is that, according to an e-mail he said he received from an FBI agent, on "one occasion the air conditioning had been turned so far and the temperature was so cold in the room that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold."
But that sure beats the temperatures on the upper floors of the World Trade Center that day when innocent Americans jumped to their deaths because jihadists turned passenger jets into manned cruise missiles.
Durbin quoted the e-mail as alleging that a prisoner who had been forced to listen to loud rap music had been "chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the floor." Why on earth would we restrain terrorists of the ilk that murdered 3,000 innocent people on American soil on Sept. 11, 2001, a date that seems to have escaped Durbin's memory?
Back when Amnesty International referred to the Guantanamo Bay dention center as "the gulag of our times," The Jawa Report had an essay that put things in perspective: The Gulag Archipelego vs. Amnesty International's 'Gulags'.
Must-read Mark Steyn: Durbin slanders his own country. (via Little Green Footballs)One measure of a civilized society is that words mean something: "Soviet" and "Nazi" and "Pol Pot" cannot equate to Guantanamo unless you've become utterly unmoored from reality. Spot the odd one out: 1) mass starvation; 2) gas chambers; 3) mountains of skulls; 4) lousy infidel pop music turned up to full volume. One of these is not the same as the others, and Durbin doesn't have the excuse that he's some airhead celeb or an Ivy League professor. He's the second-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Don't they have an insanity clause?
More from Mark Steyn on Sen. Dick Durbin and Gitmo interrogations: Facing the Music. (Via Memeorandum)Again, the more one hears the specifics of the "insensitivity" of the American regime at Guantanamo, the more many of us reckon we're being way too sensitive. For example, camp guards are under instructions to handle copies of the Koran only when wearing gloves. The reason for this is that the detainees regard infidels as "unclean." Fair enough, each to his own. But it's one thing for the Islamists to think infidels are unclean, quite another for the infidels to agree with them. Far from being tortured, the prisoners are being handled literally with kid gloves (or simulated kid-effect gloves). The US military hand each jihadi his complimentary copy of the Koran as delicately as white-gloved butlers bringing His Lordship The Times of London. When I bought a Koran to bone up on Islam a couple of days after 9/11, I didn't wear gloves to the bookstore. If that's "disrespectful" to Muslims, tough. You should have thought about that before you allowed your holy book to become the central motivation for global jihad.
Jun 16, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
From Reuters: Bush pledges to speed up aid to Africa:President George W. Bush told African leaders on Monday he would "work harder and faster" to accelerate aid to the region under a heavily promoted but little-used program after they complained the system was too bureaucratic. ...
Bush went into the meeting having turned down a proposal by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to give Africa as much as $50 billion a year by making long-term aid commitments that would allow poor countries to raise money on global capital markets.
Bush and Blair did work on a debt relief plan for Africa that finance ministers agreed on in London over the weekend, before a Group of Eight [G8] summit next month in Gleneagles, Scotland. Under the deal, about $40 billion in debt owed by 18 of the world's poorest nations, including 14 in Africa, will be canceled.
"We believe by removing a crippling debt burden, we'll help millions of Africans improve their lives and grow their economies," Bush said.
From Mens News Daily: Capitalism Is the Cure for Africa's Problems by Andrew Bernstein. (Via Harry Binswanger)The current plan of George Bush and Tony Blair to send billions more in aid to Africa is futile. History demonstrates that brutal dictatorships and savage tribes engaged in internecine warfare are not transformed by handouts. After all, billions of dollars have already been poured into Africa. What Africa needs is freedom, not welfare. The West should reject the idea that it is our responsibility to lift Africans out of their poverty -- and then tell them of the system that enabled the West to gain its current wealth and power: capitalism. ...
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 its 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, its uncompromising respect for individual rights. And to accomplish that, it first needs to remove its philosophic shackles and replace tribal collectivism with a philosophy of reason and freedom.
UPDATE -- June 17: From the South African Institute of International Affairs: The private sector, political elites and underdevelopment in Sub-Saharan Africa by Moeletsi Mbeki. (Hap tip Barry Rab.)In the model described above the underlying assumption is that private individuals are free to pursue their search for security and comfort and they therefore own and control the means of achieving their objectives. They are assumed to be free to exchange what they produce without let or hindrance and that where they are able to make savings, they are free to retain those savings and plough them back in improved techniques or in other investment avenues as they may wish.
This is not the case with the private sector in Sub-Saharan Africa. Africa's private sector is predominantly made up of peasants and secondly, of subsidiaries of foreign-owned multinational corporations. Neither of these two groups have the complete freedom to operate in the market place because they are both politically dominated by others -- non-producers who control the state. Herein lay the weakness of the private sector in Africa that explains its inability to become the engine of economic development. Africa's private sector lacks political power and is therefore not free to operate to maximize its objectives. Above all, it is not free to decide what happens to its savings.
Jun 15, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
"One malady to which political bodies are liable is the excessive accumulation of laws. Their number soon prevents the citizen from knowing what they are; and hence the need for lawyers. Some laws soon provide the means for eluding others; and hence comes chicanery. . . . Whenever legislation is too complicated [it] encourages fraud, by multiplying the chances of evasion, and very rarely adds to the solidity of title or of right. The only advantage is the greater frequency and duration of suits." -- Jean-Baptiste Say (1803) [Hat Tip: Intermarket Forecasting]Jun 14, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum: 
From The Wall Street Journal: Unsocialized Medicine; A landmark ruling exposes Canada's health-care inequity:The larger lesson here is that health care isn't immune from the laws of economics. Politicians can't wave a wand and provide equal coverage for all merely by declaring medical care to be a "right," in the word that is currently popular on the American left.
There are only two ways to allocate any good or service: through prices, as is done in a market economy, or lines dictated by government, as in Canada's system. The socialist claim is that a single-payer system is more equal than one based on prices, but last week's court decision reveals that as an illusion. Or, to put it another way, Canadian health care is equal only in its shared scarcity.
Jun 12, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
Writes David Holcberg from the Ayn Rand Institute:
The U.S. government should welcome the Cuban escapees who were independent, inventive and courageous enough to escape Cuba in a vessel fashioned out of an old taxicab.
The escapees, intercepted by the Coast Guard on the shores of Florida, risked their lives to be free in America. If the U.S. government follows its long-standing policy on Cuban refugees intercepted at sea, it will send these people back to Castro's island, where they will likely be thrown in prison and tortured. Cuba is a brutal communist dictatorship founded on the principle that individuals have no rights. As these refugees demonstrate, Cubans don't even have the right to leave the country.
The U.S. government should recognize that these Cuban escapees have a right to live in freedom, and give them asylum here in America. But more than that, our government should put an immediate end to the unconscionable policy of sending freedom-seeking refugees back to a totalitarian dictatorship.
From Reuters: 