For the past two months my significant other has been working 18-hour days at DISA Vascular, where she is Quality Assurance manager. This weekend auditors fly out from Germany to evaluate their product and their systems for that quality assurance.
Accreditation allows them to use the CE mark; the standard assurance mark that reflects compliance with essential health and safety standards set by the EU. Without it they cannot sell their product in Europe.
DISA Vascular manufactures cardiovascular stents. A failure of the product can result in fatalities. Scrutiny is quite a costly business but consumers are probably happy that this type of evaluation takes place. You are probably even more happy that scrutiny is performed by third-party professionals.
If all the stent manufacturers got together and agreed on a set of safety standards and told us to trust them, “We’ll comply with these,” you probably wouldn’t feel as safe.
Everywhere in the commercial sector there are external means of feedback to hold those responsible accountable for their actions. Financial auditors watch the money, standards authorities watch the products, journalists watch the way companies treat the public … all of this scrutiny may be unpleasant for those being observed but it helps us to feel comfortable buying products made by people we don’t know.
And then we get to the development sector where charities and development agencies assist people we don’t know to stop being poor.
In October 2006, at an international conference in Noordwijkerhout, Netherlands, the representatives of 24 countries signed a Statement of Ethical Principles in ((Fundraising)). Charitable fundraisers are to abide by this code. And we should trust them because they are working for the common good.
Imagine a similar code of conduct were issued entitled Statement of Ethical Principles for Chief Executives. Imagine CEOs across the planet told us simply to trust that they would work in the best interests of shareholders. Would you ((trust)) them? Or would you continue to demand close audit scrutiny and tough controls (like Sarbanes Oxley)?
At this moment there is limited scrutiny placed on development organisations. As William Easterly, Professor of Economics at New York University, remarks in his essay “Why doesn’t aid work?”: The two key elements necessary to make aid work, and the absence of which has been fatal to aid’s effectiveness in the past, are FEEDBACK and ACCOUNTABILITY. The needs of the rich get met through ((feedback)) and ((accountability)).
But the needs of the poor are not. There is very little. Because it’s free, because it’s donated, somehow we don’t care for accountability as much. And so, despite spending a total of $ 568 billion on aid to Africa, Africans are no better off than they were 40 years ago.
Clearly the lack of money isn’t the problem.
And so, in full awareness of this shortfall, we offer our own services. To measure the effectiveness of different approaches and different organisations, and to offer clear guidance as to what works and what doesn’t.
So that we don’t ask ourselves again, in 40 years time, “Why doesn’t aid work?”
In 1840 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in his book “What is Property?” famously declared, “Property is theft.”
"The peasant who hires land, the manufacturer who borrows capital, the tax-payer who pays tolls, duties, patent and license fees, personal and property taxes, &c., and the deputy who votes for them, — all act neither intelligently nor freely. Their enemies are the proprietors, the capitalists, the government … instead of inferring from this that property should be shared by all, I demand, as a measure of general security, its entire abolition."
Since then a great deal of effort has been put in by communists, socialists, new-economists and trades unions to exercise exactly that.
Most recently, Cosatu's secretary in the Western Cape, Tony Ehrenreich, demanded that people living in an informal settlement in the luxury enclave of Hout Bay should rise up and take land away from those with property in the area. Some residents have threatened violent retribution if anyone attempts to act on this instruction.
We talk about the redistribution of land-based property as if this, somehow, makes people wealthy. The people who earn some of the highest salaries in the world today are hedge fund managers. The only property they need to perform their job is a cell phone and a computer. What would redistribution of these assets achieve?
The most important inalienable property that you own is your life. Your liberty is the freedom to use your life. No other person, or group of people, may own you. Neither do you own the lives of others. We have laws against slavery precisely because most modern societies recognise this right.
A product of your time and your liberty is your property. If someone offers to pay you for your time to perform work on their behalf then you have entered into a property transaction. You exchange some of your property – your time – for some of their property – their money. If they value your time at an amount that you are happy with then you will work for them. It is only under an autocratic system – one which sanctifies slavery – that you would be forced to work for an amount less than the value you place on your own time.
To take ((life)) is murder. To take ((liberty)) is slavery. To take ((property)) is theft. Everything with which you transact with others is property; from the clothes you wear, to the time spent on conversation. People who waste your time are, technically, stealing it.
It takes time and investment to learn things. I spend my time on myself to develop my own abilities. That time has value. Once I have learned sufficiently then I procure property that will assist me to earn a living. If I live in a society that doesn’t allow for the individual ownership of property, then I may never make that investment in the first place. I’ll wait in line to take the property I want away from someone else.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during the recent civil war, live cows were worth significantly less than fresh beef. The reason was that marauding soldiers would attack farmers and kill them, then take their cows away. No-one wanted to own a live cow for fear of being killed. So the value of cows dropped. More importantly, since no-one wanted to invest their time in raising them, in many areas cows disappeared altogether.
The question to Tony Ehrenreich and others of his ilk is this: if you aren’t in favour of property ownership how can you have redistribution in the first place? If you abolish property rights so that you may own something not rightfully yours then there are no rights to protect your ownership of that property either. When property has no ownership then you lose even the most basic ownership of your own life and liberty.
Too many countries, in an effort to reduce very real poverty, abandon property rights and take wealth away from people who have it. Wealth generating individuals flee those countries and, as refugees, go and generate wealth elsewhere. Their home-countries are left bereft of talent and even more impoverished than before. Like the man who killed the golden goose, they discover that the wealth they wanted didn't come from ownership of other people's property.
Real development comes from respecting the property produced by others and giving individuals an incentive to create new property so that they may increase the overall wealth for everyone in that society.
The UN's World Economic Situation and Prospects 2007 report has forecast overall economic growth in Africa at 5.6% in 2007 and declares that this represents a "major turnaround from previous decades of economic stagnations".
However, that still leaves Africa significantly short of making a stab at meeting its Millennium Development Goals for halving poverty.
"((Africa))'s growth remains insufficient to achieve development goals that will appreciably reduce ((poverty)) and improve living conditions on the continent," the report says.
"Most African countries have been unable to sustain sufficiently high growth rates over the medium term."
It said that from 1998 to 2006, only seven countries out of the 52 monitored by the ((UN))'s Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) achieved an average real gross domestic product growth rate of more than 7%. And too much of that growth has been as a result of volatile commodities, like oil, that raise significant revenue which does little for job creation, and is unevenly distributed.
While international inflation is under control, "exceptions include a few countries in Africa, which have experienced a sharp increase in inflation owing to food shortages, currency depreciation and/or stronger pass-through of higher oil prices to producers and consumers."
There is much that can be done. Inefficient state monopolies can be deregulated allowing new businesses to be created. Legal systems can ensure equality before the law, rather than entrenching rights for a small autocracy. Systems for reducing legal and business complexity can be reduced.
None of this is new. The mixed messages sent by African governments regarding their policies on open markets and socialist interventions may sound like populism, but it allows the current incumbents to maintain their control.
