George Rebane

• Super Tuesday in Nevada County – Take Two
• For Your Offline Friends
• Bill Gates’ ‘Creative Capitalism’

Super Tuesday in Nevada County – Take Two  On 7 February 2008 The Union published a glowing piece on Mr. Gregory Diaz, County Clerk-Recorder, and how smoothly and competently the county’s election was conducted.  This is available here.  Hints of an alternative view began to emerge almost immediately.  The YubaNet had a reporter at the Rood Center and filed this report on YubaNet.com.  Hopefully we learned a lot this time around so that when reporting the June election we will see The Union and YubaNet flying in a tighter formation.  (For the record – Mr. Diaz’s daughter Angela Diaz is an employee of The Union.)

For Your Offline Friends – Remember those who scoffed at putting a telephone into their house and thought the tin lizzies were a passing fad.  Well, neither do I.  But I recently read and now cannot find a short little thought that went something like this –

Those with no access the internet wake up every morning into a world with yet another light turned off.

‘Creative Capitalism’ was proposed at Davos by Bill Gates who intensely dislikes (I hate the word ‘hate’) Bill Easterly’s ‘White Man’s Burden’ on the follies of western aid to the third world.  Like Soros and Buffett, Gates has now joined the enlightened billionaires club, and seeks to remake the world into a place where people get to their levels of wealth only through the power of the bayonet.  In a 7feb08 WSJ article New York University economics professor and former World Bank economist Easterly writes –

The number of poor people who can’t afford food for their children is a lot smaller than it used to be — thanks to capitalism. Capitalism didn’t create malnutrition, it reduced it. The globalization of capitalism from 1950 to the present has increased annual average income in the world to $7,000 from $2,000. Contrary to popular legend, poor countries grew at about the same rate as the rich ones. This growth gave us the greatest mass exit from poverty in world history.

The parts of the world that are still poor are suffering from too little capitalism. Foreign direct investment in Africa today, although rising, amounts to only 1% of global flows. That’s because the environment for private business in Africa is still hostile. There are some industry and country success stories in Africa, but not enough.

And in response to the state being the central planner of human economic activity –

Much research suggests that "picking winners" through government industrial policy hasn’t worked. Winners are too unpredictable to be discovered by government bureaucrats, much less by outside philanthropists. Why did Egypt capture 94% of Italy’s import market for bathroom ceramics? Why did India, an economy with scarce skilled labor, become a giant in skill-intensive IT and outsourcing? Why did Kenya capture 39% of the European market in cut flowers? Why did tiny Lesotho become a major textile exporter to the U.S.? Why did the Philippines take over 72% of the world market in electronic integrated circuits? Because for-profit capitalists embarked on a decentralized search for success.