Re: a to-do list for the next century

From: GBurch1@aol.com
Date: Sun Mar 26 2000 - 10:55:55 MST


In a message dated 3/24/00 3:52:40 PM Central Standard Time, rjs@rsie.com
writes:

> Several people have written back with the notion that the 3rd World is
> full of potential. I agree - lots and lots of potential, most of the
world'
> s
> population, resources, fascinating cultures, and (often) no lack of drive
> on the part of the people. Anyone who's travelled in the "developing"
world
> has seen this: marketplaces and traffic and microbusinesses everywhere.
> Huge potential - and yet rarely does anything of consequence. Why?
> There's no single answer - resources, education, lots of things have been
> mentioned. However, there's one thing that's a constant in
> "underdeveloped" countries: terrible, terrible, short-sighted,
kleptocratic,
> nepotistic, dictatorial >government<. The education that's supposed to
> come from giving whizzy slate computers to the people, or the rise in
> property values that might otherwise come from buying up seemingly valuable
> rights-of-way in places like Lagos, can't happen if the leaders of the
> countries won't allow you to do it - or worse, will be happy to see the
> investment, and then will confiscate it - either overtly, or over time
> through punitive taxation, extortion, and all the usual 3rd World means.

I agree with you 100% I've also traveled in the 3rd World and without a
doubt the governments are the single greatest impediment to development. But
these governments didn't happen by accident and the current crop of tin-pot
dictators and crony kleptocrats aren't isolated examples in history - they're
the norm in "modern" times throughout the developing world. Any attempt to
deal with the problem that ignores the historical and cultural milieu that
gives rise to this nearly universal phenomena (and doesn't learn from the few
notable exceptions) is doomed to failure.
   
> So - how about the Revolution Foundation? A well-funded group develops
> both a business plan - and an invasion plan - for a target country. The
> ineffective leadership is forced out in one way or another. The group
> comes in with sufficient resources (mostly trained staff, this isn't to
> be another throw-money-away venture) to build up needed institutions -
> courts, schools, etc. Our favorite sort of minimal-interference,
> market-respecting government is instituted. It doesn't have to be
> democratic, day one likely it can't be. >Now< buy the land. Sit
> back and wait.

An interesting proposal and one with resonance to ideas that have been
percolating in my mind over the last decade or so. See below.
  
> How much could it cost to take over, say, Zaire/Congo, anyway?

A LOT. Consider the now pandemic partisan warfare throughout equatorial
Africa that has created a host of armed groups there and the history of
non-native insurgent movements in other Third World locales, for instance the
dismal fate of the Walker invasion of Nicaragua in 1856 and the 1981
Seychelles coup, just to name a couple. Frankly I think it would require
hundreds of millions of dollars at least and a highly trained military force
of at least thousands of people - and even then would have a low chance of
success.

But the idea of attacking the structural corruption of Third World
governments has a lot of merit. The idea you describe above sounds somewhat
like the best of British commercial "imperialism" in the 18th through the
20th Centuries. An example that comes to mind is the way in which the UK
took over the running of China's postal and customs systems after the Second
Opium War. I know I saw a post about privatizing and international or
transnational "outsourcing" of governmental services here recently (sorry -
can't find it).

I can see an object of long-term development investment being the creation of
a transnational civic education and service organization, the goal of which
would be to develop honest and transparent institutions. Some of this effort
would literally be the creation and maintenance of efficient and open
institutions. Complementary to this would be an educational institution for
training people in the basics of civic life: Entrepreneurial and management
skills, legal knowledge and the values of an open society.

This is done on a very distributed and ad hoc basis now. Government "aid"
(the failures of which we've been discussing elsewhere) and education of some
people in Western universities happens now. The innovation would be an
explicit connection between the two and an open avowal of the superiority of
values of individual liberty, transparency and legality. Especially the
latter would require courage in the face of post-modernist relativism that
dominates so much of academia and the press now.

       Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
      Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
      http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
                                           ICQ # 61112550
        "We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
        enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
       question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
                                          -- Desmond Morris



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