Scattering Thoughts...

Nice evening. Went to a birthday celebration, dinner and a movie. The movie was Wallace and Gromit. What wonderful visual puns tucked away in the corners. The closeups on the claymation were fantastic, you could see the working lines where the characters had been formed.

Had a good time talking about coffee while sitting at Starbucks. Learned about how Equal Exchange makes a difference for local growers, and how mercenary the normal system is.

While I'm a thorough-going capitalist, and am leery of cooperatives and the like, it seems to me that this is the kind of thing that relief-minded evangelical Christians should look into. It comes along the lines of second-order change.

I believe most relief efforts are first order change, and like most "more of the same" change efforts, the end result is generally at best dilution of value, and at worst, negation of value, a moving backwards. I remember when I did business in South Africa hearing talk of the reputation World Vision has for destroying local economies.

Common sense conservative Americans don't think things through, so we throw money at a problem through the church in the same way we criticize the liberal side for throwing money at problems here at home. It strikes me as I write this that we do EXACTLY overseas in many of these relief organizations what we criticize here at home as the welfare state.

Locals in South Africa told me how the abundant influx of free food into an area destroys local market economy. How can a farmer compete with free rice and beans from America? Why would you BUY when you can queue up and get free? Why would you plant if it seems the bloody Americans are going to swoop in next season and give away, hacking your hope at self-sufficiency at its roots?

Then again, those efforts to help the farmers are often just as foolish. Buy seed for the farmers to plant? Why should the farmer be frugal year after year and develop good practices? The Americans will take care of him. Why should he learn how to increase yield? The Americans will come and plow up more land for him to plant.

So interesting that overseas, the liberal community have it so much more right (it seems from this amateurish observer) than we do. Overseas, they work with a crop already plentiful, with high demand. They do not create an artificial market. They do not override the methods or take over a piece of the production cycle.

Instead, they step in as honest brokers. They fill the niche needed to allow the local economy to flourish. If done right, they would be disappearing as well, allowing local individuals to step in and take over that function, moving to their native place, top-level consumers of the product, being simply the importers.

Fascinating thoughts for the Sunday morning wee-hours.

Bed!

D