‘Help us become like you’

If it works, don’t fix it, or so the saying goes. Free enterprise works well, if done right, but that hardly matters to the thousands of well-fed and well-educated citizens who plan to protest its ills next month at the Summit of the Americas, in Quebec City.

Thousands of protestors are expected, including Alexa McDonough, leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP), and her caucus of lost souls in search of new lost causes. The more radical members of this anti-capitalist convergence are planning “a warm and thoughtful welcoming” for delegates, which sounds suspiciously like double-speak for boldly going where no peace- loving, rock-throwing welcoming committee has gone before. By derailing the conference, the radicals hope to hasten the glorious day when capitalism is “crushed by the blows of a new revolutionary movement.”

We can’t help wonder what Fode Tounkara and Yanguine Koita might think had they lived to see such a spectacle. They were 14 and 15, respectively, when they left Guinea, West Africa, to find a better life in Europe. Their decomposing bodies were found by a mechanic in the landing gear of a Sabena Airbus in Brussels, along with a heart-wrenching note that read:

“Excellencies, gentlemen members and responsible citizens of Europe. If you see that we have sacrificed ourselves and lost our lives, it is because we suffer too much in Africa and need your help to struggle against poverty and war. We want to study and ask you to help us become like you in Africa. . . . Please excuse us for daring to write this letter.”

These young boys saw that parts of the world were prosperous, free and peaceful, while others were not. They sensed that some sort of model existed, and they wanted the developed world to help that model take root in their homeland.

Had those boys lived and been allowed to study in Europe or North America, they might have learned that Western prosperity is based on free enterprise, and on social values, such as work, education, responsibility, property rights, rule of law, democracy and political accountability.

Unfortunately, they would have also heard loud voices arguing that capitalism is heartless, unfair and exploitative. Indeed, that’s the crux of the message being delivered to the world’s poor by incompetent political leaders, by wonky non-governmental organizations, and by those who protested against capitalism and free trade in Seattle, Davos, New York City and Prague. Next stop: Quebec City.

OK, the young boys might ask, so how then do we conquer poverty? It all falls apart here, because people who don’t understand how wealth is created have no hope of ever delivering anything to anyone. All they can do is issue manifestos about the evils of globalization and urge governments to rob rich Peters to pay poor Pauls, as if that ever solved anything. “We fundamentally reject a social and economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and exchange,” one manifesto read. “Our objective is to globalize our networks of resistance to corporate rule.” Fine. Go to North Korea and let us know what you think after five years of near-starvation on a collective farm. Or five years cutting cane in the sugar fields of Cuba. Or save time and read a few books on just how badly Marx and Engels got it wrong. Redistribution is not wealth creation.

Adam Smith had it right in The Wealth of Nations when he wrote: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. [He] intends only his own gain, and he is in this . . . led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

In other words, free markets are self-organizing, flexible, adaptive and innovative. There really is an invisible hand, and it works just as nature does, with its own checks and balances and laws and rules. Yet the task of reducing poverty has been monopolized by deluded idealists who don’t have a clue how economic development works. Given their dismal track record, perhaps they should stand back and allow capitalists and free-traders to give it a try.