Red Clay Citizen

More than picket line activists:

Lately, I have become disenchanted with the vision of the “young college activist.” They are full of passion on important issues, but without drive or direction they generally just talk a lot without bringing about real change.

Well, a few N.C. State students are breaking the mold, and putting their education where their hearts are. Pavak Shah, Hersh Tapadia and Daniel Jeck, N.C. State seniors in engineering have designed a devise for low-cost TB tests as their senior design project.

The project has the potential for saving lives in parts of Asia and Africa, where tuberculosis is often diagnosed long after it can be treated.

Rather than wearing bracelets or “raising awareness,” they are actually doing something that has positive effects. Not only is there a need for their project – over a million people die of TB every year -- but the students are creating a business plan so their work does not end up where many senior projects do: on a shelf in storage.

Welfare

Disaster Relief: Go Local

At the peak of hurricane season, we should be thinking in a mode far different from the "call FEMA" mentality we've grown used to in this post-Katrina age. The application of local knowledge by local people is the only way to rise up from disaster, says the Mercatus Center in this local knowledge series.
-Max Borders

Idol Gives Back, We Give Smart

So you may have gotten misty-eyed at Idol Gives Back. It's a great show for a great cause. But we don't want to neglect other good charitable/social entrepreneurship organizations out there because we're momentarily inspired by TV Land. If you're in the giving spirit due to Ryan Seacrest and the gang, here are a few good philanthopies -- ones that focus on more than alms, and are designed to help create sustainable means of subsistence and opportunity (in no particular order):

1. Kiva - Individual to Individual micro-lending.
2. Ashoka - Organization devoted to fostering social entrepreneurship.
3. Omidyar Network - Org devote to investing in social entrepreneurship.
4. Prosper - Domestic micro-lending.
5. Grameen Foundation - Non-prof arm of the original microlender devised by Nobel Prize winner Mohammed Yunus.
6. Open World - Helping people in the third world develop free zones, technology and property rights institutions.
7. Mercy Corps - Helps the very poor while supporting the benefits of trade.
8. Heifer International - Helps people gain property in valuable livestock.
9. Red Cross - New CEO, great brand, good work.
10. City Year - Diverse set of people spend a year mentoring, teaching and giving.

Just think of how much these organizations could grow/do if the government didn't take so much of our money.
-Max Borders

Libertarianism for Progressives

Print and read.
-Max Borders

Conscious Capitalism a la Bill Gates

This talk isn't perfect, but it articulates three things everyone should remember:

a) Enterprises are the engines of wealth creation;
b) All values - even benevolent values - can figure into the world of value exchange;
c) Social entrepreneurship is possible because of a) and b).

It's long, but check it out. Bill Gates at Davos.
-Max Borders

From Leftist to Libertarian?

Interesting interview with John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods on his evolution from democratic socialist to compassionate free-marketeer. Mackey reminds us that even our most altruistic values are still values and we can create markets in them.
-Max Borders

Prosper: So Cool... Microlending in the USA

OK, so I'm probably the last to hear about this, but a friend got me interested in Prosper, a micro-credit organization that facilitates loans between two independent parties.

In other words, you can loan someone $100 to get out of a bind at %15 interest. Someone might come along and offer them the same loan for 14%, so it relies on something of a reverse auction model.

In any case, this is another way that markets and social entrepreneurship are helping people. And don't forget about the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.
-Max Borders

Healthcare: Coletti Spells it Out for the Demogogues

This is an excellent piece on some of the issues in healthcare reform. Those who blindly blame greedy corporations for our healthcare woes never look to the actual source of all the pathologies -- the government.

Coletti doesn't go as far as to accuse the left of trying to destroy healthcare markets with regulation. For the record, I do. Lemme borrow from an upcoming piece I wrote:

I believe the majority party actually knows about these pathologies. In fact, I believe they are making concerted efforts at the state and federal levels to exacerbate these problems in the name of consumer protection and insuring children. Whether through expanding children’s Medicaid into the middle class (which drives up premiums), increasing the number of state mandates (which drives up premiums), or limiting competition through keeping the tax code intact (which drives up premiums), the party in power is using regulation to crank down the government vise in anticipation of a final outcry from Americans who are tired of paying these rates and who have no idea why it’s happening. And with that outcry, they will then be able to sell America a single-payer system like Castro’s.

Compassion and Capitalism

Stossel has a column on Brink Lindsay's new book The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture. To tip off the article, Stossel makes a simple, elegant point that must be repeated time and again:

"In political life today, you are considered compassionate if you demand that government impose your preferences on others. But what's compassionate about that? Compassionate is "live and let live.""

I would add that the so-called compassion of state welfare also strips the most important aspect of our compassion -- the impetus to help others. When government bureaucrats use the coercive state apparatus to help people in the manner they see fit (crowding out private charity, introducing government inefficiency, and social dependence), they invariably make individuals less inclined to direct resources or cares to causes they deem worthy. The onus of charity is removed from the citizen and given to the state. Social entrepreneurship and markets in benevolence suffer.

I'm looking forward to reading Brink's book and hope that the upshot is that we can reconcile personal wealth and our sense of benevolence without government elites and philosopher kings. From Brink's book:

"American capitalism is derided for its superficial banality, yet it has unleashed profound, convulsive social change," he writes. "Condemned as mindless materialism, it has burst loose a flood tide of spiritual yearning. The civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, environmentalism and feminism, the fitness and health-care boom and the opening of the gay closet, the withering of censorship and the rise of a 'creative class' of 'knowledge workers' -- all are the progeny of widespread prosperity." -Max Borders