I wondered for years about why various charity organizations keep pouring enormous amounts of money into the undeveloped parts of the world, and there’s absolutely no result: the same areas remain undeveloped, people remain poor, conflicts rage and so on. On the other hand, there are places in the world which started as equally poor, and didn’t receive any aid, but on the contrary, they were exploited by the neo-colonial powers for cheap labor, and something very strange happened: there was a gradual improvement of the conditions to the level where they can no longer be considered developing countries.

And then it clicked: it’s because they made the poor people useful.

If you give the poor people money, they will spend it and then they are back on square one. They will remain forever dependent on welfare and this simply doesn’t work in the long term. However, if you find something they can do to contribute to the global economy, so that they are really useful, there is suddenly a demand for them, they are needed. And when they are needed, something wonderful happens.

You see, when you give charity money to poor people, what happens is that those poor people are completely useless. Nobody really cares whether they live or die. In fact, they are more useful dead, because they are merely a drain on local resources and don’t contribute anything of value. When you start pouring in aid, they become useful if they are alive but poor, because more aid is thus attracted to be stolen by the gangs and warlords and sold on the local markets. Since poor people are not a part of any kind of local economy, they are seen as worthless and useless, a mere object that serves to produce Western guilt and attract money and resources for thieves to steal.

But let’s say you don’t create an aid-distribution center, but a factory that will employ those poor people and pay them some wage that is miserable for the Western conditions, but is actually quite good money for the dirt-poor people. You are not exploiting them: you are making them useful. If they are not useful, they will starve: that’s how things work. If they are useful, they will work and be paid. When something useful is created, like a shoe factory, there is a need for security, because you don’t want gangs to rob and kill people randomly, and you usually employ one gang to protect you from all the others, and that’s how you get police. You want your workers to be able to follow instructions, so you build a school that will teach them to read and write. This provides employment for builders, teachers and book printers. You don’t want them to die of trivial disease, so you provide them with health care. This provides jobs for builders, doctors and nurses. You need water, electricity and sewers, so more investment is made into infrastructure. All this investment makes sense, because those workers are actually worth money to you: you manage to earn more money than you pour in.

The problem with helping the poor is that people who want to help them are motivated by wanting to feel good about themselves, and they will feel good if they unconditionally give money to the poor. However, when we look at what really happens, such unconditional help doesn’t really help the poor. On the other hand, if you try to exploit them, by finding something useful they can do for you, you will in fact help them more, but only if you don’t exploit them so mercilessly that you destroy them, which isn’t really in your best interest, because you can’t exploit them if you destroyed them, so ideally you make them thrive and do progressively more valuable work for you, and ideally you will raise their prosperity level to the point where they become the consumers of the goods and services that you yourself sell, so that they are both your workforce and consumers. And no, helping people is not about you feeling good about yourself because you handed some poor bastard a pittance. It’s about making them useful, about making them contribute to the economy. When you thus plug them into the system, you no longer have to provide them with aid. You just follow the logic of conventional economy.

I saw many cases where the Western socialists try to “help” the “exploited” workforce in some Asian country by shutting down the factory that “exploits them”, and they feel very proud of what they did, except that later they find the “liberated” workers selling sexual services on the streets. No, assholes, you didn’t liberate them – the guys who gave them a job and “exploited them” liberated them. You ruined their lives, because you made their work useless so they had nothing to sell but sex. But don’t let that stop you feeling so fucking good about yourselves because you opposed capitalist exploitation.

I just love the leftists. They keep seeing themselves as a progressive force, yet everything they touch ends up fucked.