The Johannesburg Earth Summit is already proving to be a bust, but that hasn’t stopped the first round of America bashing. The British delegation thinks the US should do more to help the world’s poor – by agreeing to targets that are unfeasable and never will be met.
This is another futile exercise in bureaucracy, and nothing more. The targets that will be set will be meaningless, and the real causes of Third World poverty will remain unsolved. Meanwhile, Robert Mugabe’s reign of terror will also escape the notice of the summit.
The real way to eliminate poverty is through free and open trade, internal support for private property rights, reducing corruption, and encouraging legal free enterprise. The Johannesburg won’t even touch on these issues. Rather, it will encourage "ecologically sustainable" developments that will just retard the growth of the Third World even more. There will be much talk, and nothing gained. Like the last Earth Summit, it’s a giant circle jerk for world leaders who want to show how much they care for the poor while screwing them over with trade barriers and ineffective IGOs. The US is right to sit this one out – we’ve more important things to do, such as liberating entire nations from tyrannical regimes.
I really like free trade- in theory. But in practice, it isn’t free. It’s merely an excuse for large American corporations to move their industry to backwaters where they can pay their employees pennies an hour, get tax breaks, and ignore environmental regulations. Until there are laws enforcing fair wages and reasonable environmental regulations for these “outsourced” industries, I vote no.
That view of globalization isn’t the whole picture, however. Look at the Index of Economic Freedom – those countries with more open economie have higher standards of living and higher per-capita incomes. The inverse is also true – the less economic freedom, the worse the quality of life.
The best way to deal with these inequalities is through open markets. Corporations can get by with this behavior because the countries they move into have no propety rights, rule of law, or laws protecting the transparency of economic transactions.
The best book I’ve yet seen on the issue was done by a Peruvian economist named Hernando de Soto called The Mystery of Capital. If more people followed his recommendations rather than asking for more handouts, we’d likely see a reduction in global poverty in the near future.