Why The World NEEDS You To Be Wealthy

Dear Friends,

I had a funny thought today as I was playing with our dogs (1/2 Wiemaraner 1/2 Yellow Lab) Bella and Loki (named all-to-accurately for the Norse God of Mischief).

As we were tussling with their favorite toy, it occurred to me that most of the world's problems are far better solved by Entrepreneurs than by anybody else.

Lets look at the history of Government do-gooding... not so good after all. To twist the phrase, "The Road to Mediocrity is Paved With Good Intentions and a Bureaucracy".

After 40 years of our best efforts to fight "The War On Poverty" it seems as if all we've done is institutionalize it.

Frankly, it's a fools errand to steal from those that are productive and give it to those that aren't.

This has been amply magnified by our disastrous foreign aid policies... We insist on sending American grain to countries in need; no problem there.

But (and it's a big but) as Buckminster Fuller said, "You can never do just one thing". By dumping all this free grain, we created the unintended consequences of:

• Destroying the entire local agricultural economy.
• Forcing farmers to leave their fields and migrate to already overcrowded cities to find work.
• Creating slums and shantytowns with little to no clean water and sanitation facilities.
• Permanently crippling the capacity of the country to ever feed itself again.
• Artificially boosting the birth rate ( universal biological response to the relief of starvation)
• But because of the population migration, this new influx of people is concentrated in exactly the wrong places.
• Because of little to no opportunity in the city for unskilled, illiterate peasants, they turn to crime, drugs alcohol and violence.
• Meanwhile, the fallow land is taken over by desertification. (Contrary to popular belief, farmed land left idle does NOT regenerate on its own... it quickly degrades into a barren wasteland).
• And finally, to add insult to injury, we have the arrogance, the presumption to ask for their gratitude. I believe that in Japanese the word for "gratitude" can also be translated as "resentment" which is exactly what we get.

All because of a government program.

Now, contrast this with the "Micro-lending" banks of Asia and India. These loans of $50 or so help a mother buy a few chickens and/or rabbits as breeding stock. She raises them for family consumption and sells the excess for cash. The food for the livestock comes from the cullings of the family garden. The earth prospers from the natural fertilizer, people are fed, and villages are maintained.

This is the promise of Entrepreneurship.

Sure it starts small, but this cycle is in harmony with nature and is a perfect example of how wealth is CREATED - not just divvied up.

As each of us CREATES NEW WEALTH, there's more for everyone... without all the suffering, corruption (did you know that most of the grain that we sent over to places like Ethiopia and Somalia was sold on the black market by the very governments we were trying to help?)

Better by far to help others learn to create their own wealth than to strip it from the "Haves".

Here's an idea: let's all become "Haves"...

Yours in Wealth,

Erik