Some people can never do right can they? I mean the rich, the filthy rich and the embarrasingly rich who have (shame on them!) contributed money to the rebuilding of the Notre Dame the Paris. For once they unhoarded their money (earned by cruelly exploiting the proletariat) for the greater good and promptly became the subject for the next virtual shit-storm: they didn’t save the world! Oh no! Rather than rebuilding a pithy church, I read all over social media, they should have sent the money to Africa in order to end world hunger. But should they really? Let’s think about this a little more before we ‘like’ these posts.
Some people can never do right can they? I mean the rich, the filthy rich and the embarrasingly rich who have (shame on them!) contributed money to the rebuilding of the Notre Dame the Paris. For once they unhoarded their money (earned by cruelly exploiting the proletariat) for the greater good and promptly became the subject for the next virtual shit-storm: they didn’t save the world! Oh no! Rather than rebuilding a pithy church, I read all over social media, they should have sent the money to Africa in order to end world hunger. But should they really? Let’s think about this a little more before we ‘like’ these posts.
A large part of the donations ($339 million) came from the families that own Luis Vuiton, Gucci, Yves Saint-Laurent and others. Naturally these are not the kind of people who receive praise from the politcal left, even if they’d sacrifice their entire belongings, but that’s not the issue here The issue is that an increasing part of the population believes not only that they are entitled to judge about other peoples spendings, but also that they know how to spend this money in a better way. Moreover, it seems a lot of people believe you can fix any problem just by simply throwing money at it – preferably somebody else’s money.
Let’s start with saving the planet. It’s undeniable that we are facing challenges in terms of environmental damage and food imbalances across our planet. The problem is that we cannot save the environment just with money, specially not the single billion raised for the Notre Dame. We need to spend (even) more money on innovation, yes, and we need a system change to enable us to stop polluting. But that’s just an indirect effort: it’s an intellectual undertaking, not a financial one. We cannot save the planet in the same way we can rebuild the Notre Dame, or any other building, nor can we end hunger or poverty in Africa. Since the end of the war, after which European powers lost most of their colonies, enough money has been sent to Africa to rebuild the Notre Dame in every village throughout the continent. Still the situation in Africa hasn’t changed: People are still starving, they are still dying of AIDS and ebola, and yet the population is still growing exponentially. Take Nigeria for example: in 1960 there were 45 million Nigerians, in 2017 there were 192 million, and it’s estimated that there will be 400 million in 2050. For comparison: the Netherlands had 11 million inhabitants in 1960 and grew to 17 million in 2017. But if the population there had grown at the same rate as Nigeria, there would now be 57 million Dutch people. You can imagine the chaos, the poverty, the hunger! The problems in Africa are largely caused by this huge increase in population while at the same time they still use traditional farming methods. Then there are the geopolitical factors: while Europe is relatively small and has many navigable waterways that enable trade, Africa doesn’t have this advantage. While there are many natural resources in Africa, there is also a lot of corruption, and so the proceeds of these resources, as well as financial aid from “the west” end up with a small African elite.
Africa’s colonial history is certainly a factor in it’s poverty, but not the only one. Yet it’s precisely this factor that the political left always emphasizes, ignoring the population explosion, corruption, dictatorships and geopolitical factors that withhold Africa from developing it’s full potential. Rather than pumping endless money into Africa to save it from itself, which has proven catastrophically ineffective, Africa needs to free itself from the shackles of it’s dictatorships and corrupt civil servants in the same way they liberated themselves from the colonial forces. By saying the money to rebuild the Notre Dame should be sent to Africa, people say it’s better to burry another billion in a bottomless pit than spend it to rebuild one of Europe’s hallmark monuments.
Then there is the underlying issue of freedom and private judgement: the people who decided to donate their money have done so out of their own free will, and they have every right to do so without interference from others. They could have also decided to keep their money and buy another private jet, all within their rights. Yet there are other peoiple who publicly exclaim that their donations to rebuilding the Notre Dame could be better spent. They are eager to tell others what should be more important to them, and all too willing to offer alternatives for the spending of other people’s money. Well, the idea of people telling other people how they should spend their money scares me, and it should scare you, because it needs just one populist leader who finds a way to exploit this, just one politician who can get these people to act on their jealousy in the ballot box, and our values are replaced by fascism or socialism. Then, when their goal has been achieved, we will have lost the freedom to spend our money as we please, and it shall not be the only freedom we have lost.
The fact that the rich spend a billion to rebuild a church should not worry anybody, it should be applauded. Rather than sitting in a hedge fund or a swiss account this money will be spent in the French economy. Unlike futile financial aid in Africa, it will make a tangible difference in Europe. What should worry us is the cultural relativism among some of us, bcause it has at it’s root cultural ignorance. Even more worrisome is that people seem to have an increasing appetite to infringe on other people’s liberties, for example how to spend their money. Unfotunately, this is not a problem that can be fixed by simply throwing money at it!