One perpetual problem faced by “do gooder” relief agencies happens when they try to help desperately poor countries deal with famine. The long term solution is to teach farmers how to grow crops, and deal with finding water, controlling pests, fertilizing and the like.
The problem is that when they give the farmers the seed corn in the spring, and return back in the fall to see how things went, they find a starving village and an empty field. The farmer will tell the aid workers they decided to eat the corn rather than plant it. [so seed corn is now treated with chemicals to make it inedible]
President Obama – and his predecessors Joseph Stalin and Mao – also did not understand this lesson and made the same mistake. If you encourage the farmer, help him nurture the crop and allow him to keep the bounty of his crop, the one seed returns 100x what was planted. If you steal the farmer’s crop in the fall to spread the wealth around to people who sat on their donkey all summer, next year he’ll eat the seed corn, and then demand you feed him and take care of him. When there is no crop left to harvest, millions of people die from starvation.
Unless of course that was the plan all along.
Ed Christian, the CEO of Saga Radio recently used the “Seed corn” analogy to warn about what is happening to the radio industry