ascanius

I don't know if I wrote this elsewhere, but I've been thinking about it and wanted to write something here. I recently finished reading Confessions of an Economic Hitman. It was a so-so book. More confessional tell-all than I really like. It raised a good point at the end, though. The Food and Agriculture Organization reports that 25,000 people die every day from starvation. Twenty-five Thousand every day! 3,000 died in the World Trade Center on September 11. I would, of course, never downplay the importance of 9/11 and the degree of the tragedy we experienced that day. My uncle was working in the Pentagon and lost colleagues. It took us hours to figure out whether he was alright or not. But where's our perspective. If we spent a fraction of what we spent in Iraq and Afganistan we could make a serious diference in terms of feeding the world's hungry. This sounds idealistic, but why should it be. 25,000 people every day! Where's the moral outrage? Where's the compassion? And I'm not doing fuck-all about it, so don't think I'm getting up on my high horse. It just seems like we as a society have our priorities all fucked up.
It kind of makes me doubt the utility of democracy. I mean, what's the point of personal freedom if we use it to buy video game systems for $10,000 while over a hundred thousand people starve to death every week? Would you trade the right to vote and spend money as you please for an equitible distribution of the world's wealth? I don't know. I think I might. Bring on the philosopher-king!