Mandela on Poverty

Mandela is in London for the Make Poverty History conference. The second link to Oxfam, includes this line, "Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings." Mr Mandela is, hardly surprising, a communist, which goes a long way to explain why he has this backwards. Poverty is not man-made and unnatural. Its wealth that is not natural and is made by man. Man has lived for millions of years as hunter-gatherers, for ten thousand years as a farmer (although most of the world for less than 5000), and for two hundred years with knowledge of industry, science, and economics. This last two-hundred year condition is not the natural one. Mandela, and his Oxfam sponsors, are profoundly deluded on this score.

I went to see an Oxfam film on sustainable farming in college. Being an alert history major (this is now nearly twenty years ago) I quickly was able to identify the film as communist propaganda. They seem to be pushing the same line. I'm interested in real sustainable farming, and the abolition of world poverty. But I am, as an Aristotelian, commited to knowing the world as it is, and then going about its change with a full understanding of human nature. The end of poverty will not be the result of Western guilt over their own conquest of poverty, but in the development of the third world, especially of its worker skills, infrastructure, and the rule of law.