Teach a Man to Fish

Jonathan Rick
  Issue XXII - May 7, 2004
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On Monday in Beinecke, the Hamilton chapter of Amnesty International asked me for money to buy a water buffalo for a farmer in Nepal. The scene reminded me of a comparable event I wrote about last year. “So, we donated spare change in water buckets at the dining halls, we fasted, we volunteered for Utica’s soup kitchen. But something was missing—an ingredient so implicit in our bounty that we overlooked its necessity. That manna is capitalism. For capitalism, in contrast to the quick fixes of Hunger and Homelessness Week, is a long-term panacea.”

Indeed, world hunger is not a problem of redistribution. As psychotherapist Michael J. Hurd observes, people don’t go hungry “because you throw out half a stick of butter or an unfinished Coke.” In the same way, malnutrition does not develop into abundance when you donate one of those shiny new twenty-dollar bills to some charity. As they say, Give a man a fish, and feed him for the week. Teach a man to fish, and feed him for a lifetime.

To wit, though the specifics vary from country to country, the root cause of hunger is always the same: not lack of handouts, but lack of capitalism. Consider sub–Saharan Africa for instance. Echoing Julian Simon’s thesis in The Ultimate Resource 2, philosopher Andrew Bernstein argues, “Africa has the identical natural resource fundamentally responsible for the West’s rise: the human mind.” Yet it lacks the social system that allows the mind to flourish, which liberates it to invent and innovate. What Africans, like other starving people, desperately need, therefore, is to marry the mind to the market.

For to the extent that it has existed, the free market has enabled abundance unmatched in human history. When was the last time a famine occurred in any capitalist nation? It is no coincidence that the hungriest countries—Somalia, Afghanistan and Haiti—are most averse to economic and political freedom.

Now, I don’t doubt the sincerity of my fellow students. But if your heart bleeds for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free to whom Emma Lazarus dedicated our Statue of Liberty, then give them the gift of capitalism and watch their cups runneth over. We can debate the details later, but let’s call a spade a spade. To paraphrase Ayn Rand, the haves have capitalism; the have-nots have not capitalism. To paraphrase President Clinton, It’s capitalism, stupid. To rephrase Karl Marx, Workers of the world unite for capitalism; you have nothing to lose but your hunger.

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Learn about Mr. Stolyarov's novel, Eden against the Colossus, here.

Read Mr. Stolyarov's comprehensive treatise, A Rational Cosmology, explicating such terms as the universe, matter, space, time, sound, light, life, consciousness, and volition, here.

Read Mr. Stolyarov's four-act play, Implied Consent, a futuristic intellectual drama on the sanctity of human life, here.