Africa Needs Capitalism, Not Good Intentions

RUSH: Have you heard some of the quotes coming out of LIVE 8? Bob Geldof — Boomtown Rats, Bob Geldof ? said, “Something must be done; anything must be done, whether it works or not.” Something must be done whether it works or not? Sir Bono of U2 said that 3,000 Africans, mostly children, are dying every day from mosquito bites. I ran the numbers. You know, 3,000, that’s 1.365 million a year. That’s just children, mostly children from mosquito bites. If you add AIDS and genocide to it, there ought not be anybody left in Africa. So we shouldn’t have to send any aid at all. But he said with all these mosquito bites we gotta do something, and something can be done. No, it can’t, not since Rachel Carson got <a target=new href=”http://www.junkscience.com/ddtfaq.htm”>DDT banned</a>. You get DDT back over there, you might be able to stop some of the malaria, some of the mosquito bites. But you look at these people with their good intentions and all that, and you realize… Two of the most amazing stories in the New York Times about this, and I don’t know what happened to the editing process; I don’t know how these two stories made it past the editor. One’s a story — both are columns, one from yesterday, one from today. Do you know since 1963 — just the US, Mr. Snerdley, since 1963 — gave $568 billion, just to Africa. Just to Africa 568 billion!
It runs out to about 13-1/2 billion a year. That’s in today’s dollars. So it’s actually more than that when you — $568 billion since 1963, and still the problem persists. Why? When you look at the “war on poverty” in this country, and since 1964 we’ve transferred between three and $5 trillion from producers to non-producers. Yet we don’t count the casualties in this war. We never hear anybody talking about an “exit strategy” for this war, and we don’t ever talk about anything but the good intentions of the people whose policies have failed — and that’s all we’re doing now, is sitting around regaling these LIVE 8 performers. “Oh, they care!” Well, they haven’t done diddly-squat. You know, the model for fixing all this is right under everybody’s nose. You know what it is? The model for fixing Africa and any other socialist country is right under everybody’s nose. It’s called the United States of America, “But, oh, no! Oh, no!” We can’t impose our way of life on people. We can’t do that. We can impose socialism and poverty on them all day long because it’s done under the guise of good intentions.
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RUSH: Redlands, California. Hello, Carl. Nice to have you on the program, sir.
CALLER: Yeah, Rush, I was changing this morning and tuned you in as I usually do and I was shocked by what you were saying concerning the Africans and so forth.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: It seems as if you would like to see not only the Africans die, without any particular cause, either by murdering themselves off or dying by disease —
RUSH: (sigh)
CALLER: — and the same thing true in Afghanistan and so forth. You know, I think you could do everyone a favor, your listening audiences and so forth, but do the same thing that Sandra Day O’Connor has done. Resign. Give yourself a break —
RUSH: (Laughing.)
CALLER — or at least go home this evening and listen to your tapes and you’ll recognize how cold and hearted — cold-hearted — you are.
RUSH: Don’t forget “cruel.” Cold-hearted and cruel.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Cold-hearted and cruel.
CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Yeah, Carl, I don’t need to go home and listen to tapes. I listen to MP3 files. Tapes, I don’t use anymore, and I don’t need to listen because I remember myself doing the program since I host it. This just points out the great disconnect that I’m talking about that’s out there. Carl, you know, you hear certain things and you have knee-jerk reactions. You are hearing things I did not say. You are assigning to me emotions I do not have. You are reacting based on your own template. You are unable to hear one thing I said. Everything I said was oriented on success in Africa. I’m tired of failure. I’m tired of people dying, and I’m tired of people with good intentions failing getting all the credit for caring. I’m tired of never-ending efforts to prop up socialist regimes with relieving debt or sending more money over there and all it ends up is the same. I’m tired of do-gooders like Rachel Carlson getting DDT banned because it supposedly kills while it’s wiping out a continent from people dying from mosquito bites, Carl. Mosquito bites! I don’t know how much money in the world is going to stop that. I don’t know how much caring in the world is going to stop mosquito bites. The only thing that’s going to stop mosquito bites are insecticides that do-gooder liberals in this country have seen fit to ban around the world. You know, you see something totally different than I do when you hear these stories coming out of Africa. You see the efforts and the intentions. You see the beauty of people finally getting together to “do something,” and I look at results, and I see that despite all the efforts and the good intentions, no progress has been made at all.
Yet here we go. More LIVE 8s, more caterwauling, more protests — all from the same people who have failed over the years, demanding that more be done with somebody else’s money. Meanwhile, this current administration has done more for Africa in terms that you probably would appreciate than any of his predecessors. He’s done more than any rock stars and their concerts. Yet it doesn’t seem to register with people. We still don’t do enough. We’ll still calculate, “Weeeeeeell, we don’t give enough according to GDP. We don’t give as much as the Netherlands do, as a percentage of GDP.” Try this. As I said, Carl — I don’t know where you were — over $600 billion from this country alone to Africa alone, in 43 years, with nothing to show for it. We’ve had two genocides; we have a stateless regime in the Sudan where another genocide is going on. We have the destruction of capitalist countries all over. We’ve got Robert Mugabe running wild, taking land away from private property owners. Nobody complains. Nobody says a word. Nobody makes an effort to get rid of people like Mugabe — and yet the efforts of LIVE 8 and others with big hearts and great intentions continue, as though they’re new and unique. It’s like war on poverty in America, as I said. We’re not allowed to “impose our form of government to people” — but it’s not an imposition to impose freedom.
What’s needed in Africa is capitalism. What’s needed in Africa is personal income. The only way we’re going to wipe out poverty anywhere is with individuals and increasing personal income. You do that with jobs not with roads and bridges and clean water. You do it with a growing economy. You do it with imports and exports. You do it with trade. You do it with a time-honored techniques that have happened here. You do it with freedom. But you don’t do it with people like Robert Mugabe. You don’t do it with dictators, thugs like existed in Somalia, Rwanda and currently in the Sudan and Zimbabwe — and sadly, slowly becoming the same in South Africa. You don’t do it with people like Moammar Khadafy up in Libya. You just don’t do it. You’re never going to reform a country that has leadership like this in such a great percentage of the country. This continent is beyond the realm now of just forgiving debt or throwing money at it. And yet, like I say, what is this, 40 years, folks. Forty years, $600 billion hasn’t accomplished a thing. Still got the problem. Still bellyaching about the same circumstances and the same situation. Yeah, I’m sick and tired of it. Damn right I’m tired of it. But where you’re wrong, Carl, is that I’m not tired of trying to actually fix it. I am tired of people dying, and I’m really tired of people who are doing nothing about it getting all the credit for trying to stop it because as long as they keep getting credit, their efforts, which have failed, are going to continue, which all equals failure and I’m fed up with failure.
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