It's no secret what it takes to end poverty, hunger, lack of opportunity, and the inability to provide for one's family. They are the same things we and all the other prosperous countries of the world have employed to end poverty, hunger, generate opportunity, and provide families with abundance.
You need a framework of laws to protect people from force, fraud and abuse, and to ensure the sanctity of private property. You need honest police and courts to enforce these laws. You need a stable currency that people can depend on to encourage commerce. You need a culture that cherishes families, nourishes children, shames self-destructive behavior.
Where these elements exist, people prosper. Where they are absent, people starve.
There have been some successes in the world; South Korea, Taiwan, Costa Rica, and we have helped. There are other places where nothing seems to work, and our efforts have been wasted, most of Africa, much of S. America, etc. We have to keep trying but boy do we need some new paradigms because we can't keep wasting time and money on strategies that keep failing. |
