The venerable non-governmental organization known as Oxfam began as an effort to relieve famine, but like all NGOs, they’ve moved a long way from their initial goals, says Tim Worstall:
Oxfam started out as famine relief — a good, Godly, righteous thing to be doing. Get food to the starving — bonzer.
Then two things happen. One, we find out that shipping food to the starving — except in the most obvious cases of outright famine — isn’t really the way to do it. Because that bankrupts all the farmers for the next year, we make the problem permanent. Instead, we should ship money to poor people so they can buy food.
This requires fewer bureaucrats in aid agencies.
Second, obviously, any and every organisation gets colonised by lefties. They’re parasites who cannot create so they take over.
The two combined leads to this:
The world’s wealthiest people are not just profiting from the polluting causes of climate breakdown, they are also increasingly cashing in on the catastrophic consequences, according to a study by Oxfam.
The global equality organisation
Global equality organisation, eh?
Actual poverty, real absolute poverty, has been falling off a cliff these past 50 years. It’s the one grand achievement of that neoliberal free trade and globalisation thing. So, if you’re a lefty bureaucracy you’ve got to find something else to worry about. There just aren’t that many poor people to keep the money rolling in. Further, everything we know about poverty reduction tells us that a bureaucracy stuffed with lefties isn’t the way to alleviate it.
Just as with the definition of poverty in the rich countries these days. There simply isn’t anyone, not in all of North America, all of Europe, trying to live on that $3 a day consumption value (at US supermarket prices as well) definition of absolute poverty. Just not a one. So, given that we’ve solved poverty — as capitalist free markets and neoliberalism, free trade, do — what’s to be the justification for still expropriating the rich and continuing to have vast bureaucracies stuffed with lefties consuming society from within? Redefine poverty, obviously, claim that inequality is poverty and anyone who disagrees is a fascist and quite possibly a racist to boot.
And what’s Oxfam doing on that global scale? Reinventing itself as an inequality campaigner, not a feeder of the — few remaining — starving. In order, obviously, to keep the grift going and keep paying $150,000 a year salaries in gibs to those senior people in Kampala, Uganda.
At which point, obviously, fuck ’em.
He’s quite right that true poverty has fallen dramatically, worldwide:
