An obvious statement understood by anyone with half a brain. Those who disagree with capitalism, my condolences for your handicap of having half a brain or less.
---------- Randy Who always laughs at the idea that the West became rich by stealing from the poor countries. Remember the quote from Willie Sutton regarding the reason he robbed banks.. http://www.aei.org/publication/poor-nations-are-poor-because-of-the-lack-of-capitalism-not-because-of-it/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=pethokoukispoornations Poor nations are poor because of the lack of capitalism, not because of it Why are the wealthiest nations so much richer than the poorest nations? Harvard’s Ricardo Hausmann <http://growthlab.cid.harvard.edu/news/what-should-we-do-about-inequality> explains what’s behind global inequality and poverty: So there are these enormous differences in productivity that make the productive places rich and the unproductive places poor. The poor people are not being exploited. They’re being excluded from the higher productivity activities. It’s not that the capitalists are taking a very large share of what they produce. It’s just that they produce very little in the first place. … [image: Twenty20.] <http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/twenty20_7de84ae1-915a-420b-944d-8cd37f9db403_poor_homes-e1450461883995.jpg> Twenty20. *Poor places are characterized by the absence of capitalist firms and by self-employment, employment: these are small peasants and farmers or owners of small shop. In these settings, there are no wages, there’s no employment relationship. There are no pensions. There is no unemployment insurance. The trappings of a capitalist labor market do not exist.* While Marx thought that capitalism, as a form of organizing production, would take over the world, poor countries and regions are characterized by the absence of capitalism, of capitalist forms of production. So the question we should ask ourselves is why did capitalism not succeed in these regions, leaving huge differences in productivity between the places where it succeeded and the places where it did not? The answer we have found is that modern capitalist production requires the simultaneous access to many different inputs. “Inputs” can mean many different kinds of networks: water, electricity, urban transport, roads, the educational system, banking, Internet. I would also include economic freedom as a pretty important input, the ability to take risks and innovate without government preemptively quashing you or taking all your profits. Not exactly sure the degree to which the other stuff matters with that political economic input. As Deirdre McCloskey <http://deirdremccloskey.org/docs/pdf/McCloskey_IdeasEnrichedTheWorld.pdf> elegantly states it, “The modern world was made by a slow-motion revolution in ethical convictions about virtues and vices, in particular by a much higher level than in earlier times of toleration for trade-tested progress — letting people make mutually advantageous deals, and even admiring them for doing so, and especially admiring them when, Steve-Jobs-like, they imagine betterments.” But anyway, Hausmann adds, “you don’t connect people because they’re poor and because they’re not connected, they’re unproductive and hence poor.” So how to deal with that fixed costs issue and break that poverty cycle? First, “some technological innovations might reduce those fixed costs, and if the fixed cost is reduced, more people can be included.” Second, “have a policy that shares the fixed cost.” I guess this would mean something like government intervention to, say, make sure everyone has Internet access. Sometimes, however, that intervention might mean getting government out of the way. For instance <http://www.technologyreview.com/news/542161/facebooks-internet-drone-team-is-collaborating-with-googles-stratospheric-balloons/> : Facebook and Google compete intensely for your time online and for the ad dollars of corporations. But now the two companies are collaborating on efforts to use balloons and drone aircraft to expand Internet access to the four billion people that don’t have it. 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