Alan Greenspan: Rock Star!?!

Here it is at last the Live 8 concerts, proudly brought to you by the same people you saw sleeping in the back of your economics class. They don’t want you to give charitable donations this time; they want you to ask your government to tax you out of your money after the government forgives debts to Africa. On that single basis along the debt relief is a bad idea; I for one don’t need more taxes. To make things worse, it WON”T HELP!!! The problem with Africa is not that the people are poor, the problem is that the way the governments work in Africa no one will ever have property or money. The dictator du jour found in most African governments creates instability. The laws in the African countries do not recognize individual property rights. They do not allow for banking systems like they do in the First World nations. Africa is made up of Third World nations not because they lack resources or they compassion of the G8 nations. It is because their governments will not institute laws that allow them to modernize their economies and become First World nations.
Let me attempt a little lesson in logic here. What all of these singers and movie stars are doing is called (in the Latin) argumentum ad verecundiam. Otherwise called argument or appeal to authority. They are singers! When Bono wins a Nobel Prize in economics he can lecture all of us about how debt relief will save Africans from their own governments. Until then as far as I am concerned the only thing Bono knows about economics is that when U2 puts out a new album his bank account grows. I wouldn’t necessarily want Alan Greenspan to put out a new rock album and I definitely don’t want Bono standing in as an economics professor.