The causes and cures of poverty in today's world.

摘要

A thousand years ago, the "Free Cities of Europe" brought raw material from the countryside (wool for example), processed it and sold the surplus back to the countryside. But the serfs decided they could build their own looms and fulling vats and produce their own cloth:; The struggle ... lasted at least seven or eight hundred years. All through the fourteenth century regular armed expeditions were sent out against all the villages in the neighborhood and looms and fulling-vats were broken or carried away ... The leading cities resorted to armed force in order to destroy rival economic power in other cities and to establish a completer economic monopoly.{dollar}sp1{dollar}; Europeans had learned to "plunder by trade." Today's "plunder by trade" and impoverishment of those who lose out in these trade wars is identical to that of the "Free Cities of Europe" and was the cause of World Wars I and II, the Cold War, and the battles going on today.; The formula is: deny weak societies technology and capital, purchase their resources at roughly 20 percent the labor cost of the First World, process those commodities, and sell the finished products at roughly seven times the commodity cost for a wealth appropriation rate of 35 to one.; To eliminate poverty, reverse that 1,000 year system of "plunder by trade," guarantee the security and industrialization of any region that is willing to disarm, turn currently wasted industry to producing industry for that region (it will take surprisingly little).; A region could be capitalized quickly and the people could, over a period of 45 years, eliminate most poverty. The world can be peaceful if we only recognize the true cause of wars and poverty and reverse that 1,000 year policy of "plunder by trade." ftn {dollar}sp1{dollar}Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 277. Quoting the classics: Henri Pirenne's Economic and Social History and Eli F. Heckscher's Mercantilism; Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), p. 279.