You still pretend that your strawman is what it's all about. As if the what is mentioned in the O is an attempt to help long-dead ancestors and not their descendants.
When talking about righting wrongs, those are the only people who were wronged. I accept that you don't want to go back and help those people. My point is simply that those are the people who were wronged, so there's no wrong that you can right.
Right, so you understand that it was never about your strawman, you couldn't come up with the quotation that I asked you for, and yet you pretend that the only people who were wronged were the people from whom the European colonizers stole the land and not also their descendants. And then you repeat that it won't change "anything that happened to those people at all," as if that is what is intended. You try to make it much too easy for yourself, and I think you know that you are being disingenuous.
I find the idea that people living today were wronged by something that happened more than a century ago to be very strange.
I certainly agree that they were born into a bad situation that was caused by european colonization. But that's very different from the idea that they have been wronged.
No, what I sympathize with is attempts to improve their actual welfare.
Great! Me too. Let's actually look at what can do that effectively.
And I don't think that they should be content with being promised that their own descendants may some day achieve acceptable living conditions. "Access to basic necessities" is obviously better than lacking access to basic necessities, but they are just that: basic necessities!
Don't make the best the enemy of the good. Some improvement is better than none and plans to achieve a perfect solution that
don't work are worse than plans that achieve some improvement effectively.
And basic necessities are a far cry from the
luxurious lifestyle that some South Africans have access to - based on the land their ancestors stole and work that generations of black South Africans have done tilling that land and working those mines since then.
That's an issue unrelated to how to best improve that actual lives of these people.
No, hurting everyone would be the opposite of improving the living conditions of the poor masses, wouldn't it?! So what makes you claim that "that's exactly" what I think?!
Because that's the outcome that the plan you support would achieve. It may not be it's aim and I suppose you don't think that's the outcome that would accrue, but it's nevertheless that case that that's what would happen.
Of course, that is the new and improved strawman: the only alternative to the distribution of the wealth that is centralized in very few (usually white) hands in South Africa is a 'solution that hurts everyone.'
There may be some solutions that I haven't considered that could be very effective. I don't think the solution being discussed in this thread is one.
Yes, keep pretending that while we're waiting for your version of trickle-down economics to work. For the South Africans perusing the
Sotheby's International Realty catalogue, waiting is sweet. And hurting
them would be hurting
everyone, wouldn't it?!
And for some people, expectations beyond
"basic necessities" are unrealistic. They should admire the lifestyle of the rich and be happy with
what they have(n't) got:
It
is working. I gave you data to show just that. It also noted that the middle class is growing, not
just that people are escaping from extreme poverty.
ETA: I should address the data you presented regarding poverty on the rise. There has been an uptick, according to your numbers, from 53% living in poverty in 2011 to 55% in 2015. On the other hand, the numbers I presented for
extreme* poverty, showed that number falling from 53% to 20% since 1994. That's a longer, more stable trend and a much larger change. It's not clear that the trend you present is related to policy rather than just random shifts in the economic situation. But maybe you could be clear about what you attribute that change too.
*Just to be clear, obviously the things we are discussing are two different variables. It's possible that poverty went up while extreme poverty went down, but I doubt that, and I suspect that if we looked me might find that extreme poverty went up during the time period you are discussing as well.
