Take Back the Pecos

     In this month's issue of one of our competitor magazines, the Catholic bishop of New Ulm bemoans the radical anti-family agendas that undergird recent United Nations resolutions on what the developing countries ought to do -- not to become rich exactly, but, as I take it, to grow docile, to become just like the developed nations, only easily managed and comfortably poorer.  Always at the top of such resolutions stand the promotion of birth control and the "empowerment" of women.  Naturally, the bishop attacked the agendas for their antipathy to the family, an antipathy that seems to have been elevated to the status of an idol.  The old Moloch worshippers made their own children "pass through the fire," had to get toked up on incense to bear to do it, and did it as part of a grim votive economy, believing that they would otherwise lose their slight and unsteady advantage over bare subsistence.  The new worshippers of Moloch are more cultured: they want to make other people's children pass through the fire, and for what economic purpose of their own, I leave the reader to surmise.

     For if you really wanted a developing nation to grow rich, you could hardly do better than to take every one of the United Nations resolutions and enact exactly the opposite.  And the two cases in point illustrate the madness quite nicely.  Let's suppose that I'm the shrewd tyrant of a developing nation.  Let's suppose that I care about one thing only: the prosperity of my people.  I'm not wicked, but I have no use for a priori principles of justice, no use for any theories on what the ideal society looks like, no devotion to any particular faith.  I only want to make my people rich -- or, more specifically, I want to surpass my rival nation to the north.  I want to kick them senseless.  What should I do?

     Grant that I've got a good deal of arable land in need of irrigation and fertilization; I've also got a lot of grassland for ranching; no navigable rivers but several ideal ports on the sea; huge deposits of minerals and natural gas and oil; a passable climate; and cultural connections with several dozen nations, at least one of them rich.  What do I need?  Well, I need people, lots of them, and I need to untie their hands.  It won't do to have a large population if a significant percentage of them remain idle, or batten on the proceeds of crime.  Therefore any country's largest source of antisocial behavior -- government -- will have to be kept to a minimum.  Bribery must be punished swiftly and severely.  And since most criminals are young men, above all I must see to it that young men are gainfully employed.  I must win them as allies in my project, for two obvious reasons.  First, since they are filled with what Harvard professor Henry Mansfield identifies as "thumos," or spirit, drive, fire, ambition, the wild longing to achieve grand things, they are the ones from whom I will profit most quickly and most substantially.  After all, I have hills to level, swamps to drain, ports to dredge, railroad tracks to lay, mines to dig, stone to be quarried, rivers to dam up, plains to be irrigated and laced with nutrients.  I have roads to build, slums to clear away, bricks to fire, and trucks and ships to be loaded.  Second, since those young men are filled with that "thumos," if I don't enlist them, if indeed they are not my lieutenants and sergeants and corporals and infantrymen in the development of my country, they will destroy whatever I try to build.  I must have them as leaders, or must suffer them as drones, thieves, ruffians, and wreckers.  Looking with scorn upon my rich and supine nation to the north, I choose the former.

     They will be the readier to work for me because they too will have mouths to feed, and many of them.  I proceed on the principle that unless government chicanery and private thievery intervene, two hands can produce far more than one mouth can consume.  Therefore I encourage the production of as many hands as possible.  I want more hands, because I want more work from them -- because, as I said, I have a lot of hills to level and swamps to drain and all the rest.  That means I will encourage large families.  And that means that the last thing I'd ever do -- again, I want my people to grow really prosperous -- would be to make women independent of men.  I know that a good man will break his back to labor to feed his family, and that a good woman will make the fruits of his labor stretch as far as they can.  So I will pay the hard worker a decent wage, not out of charity, but merely to promote that dream of nation-kicking that I have mentioned; yet I would never be able to afford a short work week to cover that wage.  You say, "How can you, O tyrant, afford to maintain a safety net for all these people, if they have large families?"  Well might you ask.  I can't afford it -- so I don't try.  The family is the safety net.  I assist it mainly by keeping the peace and keeping my hands from the family's pockets.  But I encourage a most strict sexual morality.  Call it Puritan, if you like, or Amish; I don't care.  All I know is, it does what I want.  It is an essential component of thrift, as is the sexual division of labor.  It helps my developing country prosper.

     Education?  I can't afford the twaddle of the rich.  Take your sociology and anthropology and all your ologies north, please, and saddle my rival with them.  I want results soon: so the children in my country are taught to read and cipher in a couple of years, and then, unless they show extraordinary intellectual promise, they are apprenticed to learn a trade.  Such apprenticeships may well involve some book-study -- I have nothing against that.  But the sort of thing I want to see is a twenty-five year old lad of my country managing an oil derrick, as he well might, with ten years of experience under his belt.  My institutions of higher learning would concentrate on the practical sciences first, because that is what we need first.  And since I know (for I am no unlettered man, I can read history) that the "thumos" of men in groups is not simply additive but multiplicative, I will make sure that they have the opportunity to develop in groups -- in those colleges and universities.  I figure that if I don't corral them there, they'll gather in their own sorts of groups: gangs, for instance.

     In thirty years, with any luck, I'll have my rival by the throat.  So why would obviously intelligent people try to force policies upon my country that are guaranteed to keep us where we are?