I wonder if the folks over at the Noble Foundation know what they have done. For those of you not keeping up, the United States had a sweep going receiving prises in Medicine, Chemistry, Physics and Economics. We all knew that couldn't last so it was no surprise that the Literature prise went to a Turk. But the crème` de la crème, of course, is the original, the Peace Prize. And everybody knows an American can only get this prize (nowadays) if he's disagreeing with the United States. (Cough, Cough)
As with most everything bleeding-heart, leaf-kissing liberals do, this round of laureates is rife with potential political humor. The Medicine prize was for discovering a way to “control the flow of genetic information.” Because, we all know, Liberals cannot stand the free flow of information... The Physics prize was given for discovering proof of the “Big Bang”. So apparently they are still harking back to John Kerry's explosive start in his campaign; of course, the “Bang” was about all there was.
Enough with all that. What I'm confused about is if they know what they did in awarding this Peace Prize. Muhammad Yunus received the Prize for “efforts to create economic and social development from below.” Basicly what the guy did was thus: he gave small loans to poor people, mostly women, to help them begin businesses and pull themselves out of poverty. The big difference between his method and a bank's loan was Yunus did not require collateral – because the borrowers had none.
Now I will grant that Muhammad Yunus' motivation was to help the poor, a subject Liberals believe themselves to have a lock on. However, his method of solving their poverty problem was straight out of the Wealth of Nations; it was text-book capitalism. Yunus was moved by the poverty stricken neighborhoods he walked past going to his job teaching economics at the local university. Had a member of the Democrat party been in his shoes, they would have petitioned for a government grant to help out these people. Good communists would have demanded laws forcing the established banking institutions to approve loans for these people. Yunus, God bless 'em1, reached into his own pocket and gave of his own money, in the form of a loan.
One good capitalist, conservative-compassionate turn deserves another, and it did not stop not there. The borrowers, mostly women, started businesses. These were no get-rich schemes; many people bought a cow and sold the milk. Some bought rice, hull on, and did the work to remove the hulls. The de-hulled rice was sold at a profit and the rice hulls were fed to chickens, the eggs of which were also sold at a profit.
Now, what would have happened if the only move made by our good humanitarian had been to procure a no-payback grant? Sure, some enterprising folks would have seized the opportunity to get out of the squalor of poverty and made a go of a new business. Most though, would have got themselves though that day, or the next week and then been right back in the same position. Yunus' loan gave them the little boost they needed to get off the ground and the incentive to stick with it. This when the banks would not give a loan without collateral.
The proof is in the pudding, and Yunus must have been doing something right. 30 years later his Grameen bank sports 2,200 branch offices in a cooperative style set-up. They are serving 6 million borrowers and this year they expect $800 million in loans. Most of those loans will be less than $100, most will be to women and most will be pulling someone out of poverty by their own hand.
So I ask again. Do the folks at the Nobel Foundation know what they've done?
1 Sorry Muhammad, but that was Jehovah