Self-Inflicted Poverty by Walter E. Williams, Ph.D.

The following article is by Walter E. Williams, Ph.D. (African American). La Raza Racism has taken to liberty of modifying this piece.

Did you learn that the United States is rich because we have bountiful natural resources? This is just another distortion by the multi-cultural Left. Africa and South America are probably the richest continents in natural resources, but are home to the world's most miserably poor people. On the other hand, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Switzerland, and England are poor in natural resources, but their people are among the world's richest.

More than likely your liberal college professor taught that the legacy of colonialism explains Third World poverty. That's another lie! Canada was a colony. So were Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. In fact, the richest country in the world, the United States, was once a colony. By contrast, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tibet, Sik kim, Nepal and Bhutan were never colonies, but they are home to the world's poorest people.

There's no complete explanation for why some countries are affluent while others are poor, but there are some leads. Rank countries along a continuum according to whether they are closer to being free-market economies or whether they're closer to socialist or planned economies, a redistribution of wealth based on race, liberal guilt, and entitlements. Then, rank countries by per-capita income. We will find a general, not perfect, pattern whereby those countries having a larger free-market sector produce a higher standard of living for their citizens than those at the socialist end of the continuum.

What can the West do to help? The worst thing is more foreign aid. For the most part, foreign aid is government to government, and as such, it provides the financial resources that allow Latin American and Africa's corrupt regimes to buy military equipment, pay off cronies and continue to oppress their people. It also provides resources for the leaders to set up "retirement" accounts in Swiss banks. Even so-called humanitarian aid in the form of food is often diverted. Blundell reports that Mugabe's thugs rip labels off of wheat and corn shipments from the United States and Europe and re-label them as benevolence from the dictator.

Most of what Africa and Latin America needs, the West cannot give, and that's the rule of law, private-property rights, an independent judiciary and limited government. The real question now is whether biased college professors will include this position in their lectures and textbooks.