This article, a follow-up to “The Inverted Moral Priorities,” was published in the
next issue of The Ayn Rand Letter, dated July 29, 1974; again, it was written several
months later than this date.

I hope that my [recent articles] have helped you to see the cannibalistic nature of
altruism in action and the extent to which it is devouring this country. But you have not
yet heard the whole story.
At a time like the present—when this country is threatened with economic collapse
under the burden of supporting millions of nonproductive citizens, and the heavier
burden of the parasites-on-parasitism: the welfare-state bureaucracy—a new campaign
is being sneaked up on us, softly, tentatively, but insistently: a campaign to load us with
the responsibility of feeding the whole world.
No, that campaign does not mean it symbolically or allegorically or oratorically, or in the
form of aspirational mush—but literally, officially, permanently, by law and by force. (I do
not know which is more evil in this context: those who believe that that mush is an
idealistic aspiration or those who cash in on it. I am inclined to say: the former.)
An interesting trial balloon was sent up in a column by Anthony Lewis, entitled “The
Politics of Hunger” (The New York Times, October 24, 1974). It is particularly interesting
(and revealing) in its implications, which the columnist, apparently, did not see and does
not consider.
In its own journalistic terms, the column is honestly factual: it presents the problem
clearly and offers no solution (except in murky hints). It starts with: “On the current
trends of population and food production, according to international experts, by 1985 the
poor countries of the world would need 85 million tons of grain a year from outside. In a
year of bad harvests, the need could be 100 million tons, or even more.” And: “Before
the problem of moving that much food, there are the questions of how to grow it and pay
for it. At today’s prices, 100 million tons of cereals would cost something approaching
$20 billion. Haiti and Bangladesh and the thirty other food-short countries will not have
the foreign exchange to pay for it. Who will?” This, properly, is the first question to ask.
(The column does not answer it.)
That is the scale of the issues facing the World Food Conference in Rome
starting Nov. 5. Public discussion of the food problem understandably tends to
focus on immediate matters, such as the amount of American aid to hold off

imminent mass starvation in South Asia. But the conference is meant to take a
longer view, and that means dealing with the most fundamental issues of
population, resources and the wealth of nations. [Emphasis added.]

It sure does. (No such issues were raised at that conference.)
Mr. Lewis indicates, “State Department officials preparing for the conference seem
modestly hopeful of agreed progress in defining the problems”—and lists some of the
points they “sketch.” One such point reads: “There must be intensified international
efforts to increase food production in the less developed countries, for example by
scientific improvements in tropical agriculture.”
“Scientific improvement” means technology. How would they reconcile it with the
worldwide assault on science and technology by ecological crusaders, who demand a
return to “unspoiled” nature? Those starving populations are certainly living in the midst
of “unspoiled,” untouched nature. Which fundamental goal are the world-planners going
to pursue: production or ecology? And how will the scientists function in countries where
science is banned, reason is a hated enemy, and the crudest mystic superstitions rule
the people’s lives, traditions, and rudimentary culture? What self-respecting scientist
would want to work in such conditions—and why should he? Neither the column nor, I
am sure, the State Department answers any of these questions.
The paragraph continues: “But for the foreseeable future there will be dependence on
imports from a handful of surplus countries, primarily the U.S., Canada, Australia,
Argentina, and the Common Market.” Ask yourself: What do these countries (with one
exception) have in common? Two paragraphs later, Mr. Lewis says that the American
delegates expect another conference after the one in Rome, “a negotiating conference
among the major grain-exporting countries and the big consistent importers: India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan, the Soviet Union, and China.” What do these countries
(also with one exception) have in common?
The column offers some vague hints about someone’s proposal to establish world grain
reserves, and to agree on “who should contribute how much … in what would amount to
an international system of national reserves.” (?) There is even an indication of what is
the immediate, “practical” goal behind that food conference and what sort of deadly
game is being played. “Secretary Kissinger is said by his associates to see the food
issue now as a crucial example of the new interdependence of nations.”
The game, apparently, is to trick the Arabs into some sort of One-World Economic Order
which would enable us to barter our grain for their oil (if they don’t outsmart us). And this
is the sort of lofty purpose for which somebody is willing to sell America’s soul, her
sovereignty, her freedom, and your standard of living. The alleged justification is global

need, compassion, altruism. To pragmatists of this kind, altruism is the window dressing,
the bait that lures the victims to slaughter.
(This is an interesting example of today’s alliance between the “practical” men and the
intellectuals—an alliance based on mutual contempt, with each side believing that it is
using the other. The “practical” men are willing to adopt any currently fashionable
ideology in exchange for some material advantage of the moment. The intellectuals are
willing to support any “practical” policy that leads toward their own long-range
ideological goals. In this case, the “practical” men want oil; the intellectuals want One
World.)
Mr. Lewis seems to see a little further than the “practical” diplomats. He seems to take
altruism seriously—and he is pressing for the logical consequences of such
international schemes. His concluding paragraph states:
All of the thought on reserve mechanisms, hard as it is, only touches the surface
of the world food problem. Underneath there is the question of money—the need
for the less developed countries to have enough of it so the U.S. and others can
go all-out in food production for them. Aid can hardly make a dent in that need. In
the long run there must be real transfers of purchasing power, and that in turn
raises the whole question of the oil producers and their responsibility as well as
ours. [Emphasis added.]

And this in turn raises the whole question of what is purchasing power and whether it
can be “transferred.”
In my [article in Philosophy: Who Needs It] on “Egalitarianism and Inflation,” I said that
money cannot function as money, i.e., as a medium of exchange, unless it is backed by
actual, unconsumed goods. Mr. Lewis’s last paragraph is a nice bit of evidence to
support my contention. If money does not have to be backed by goods, why do the less
developed countries need it so badly? Why can’t their governments print more paper
currency? Why are the U.S. and others unable to go all-out in food production, without
receiving any payment for it? Why doesn’t the need—the desperate need—of the
consumers endow them with purchasing power?
Obviously, purchasing power is an attribute of producers, not of consumers. Purchasing
power is a consequence of production: it is the power of possessing goods which one
can trade for other goods. A “purchase” is an exchange of goods (or services) for goods
(or services). Any other form of transferring goods from one person to another may
belong to many different categories of transactions, but it is not a purchase. It may be a
gift, a loan, an inheritance, a handout, a fraud, a theft, a robbery, a burglary, an
expropriation. In regard to services, however (omitting temporary or occasional acts of

friendship, in which the payment is the friend’s value), there is only one alternative to
trading: unpaid services, i.e., slavery.
How can you “transfer purchasing power” to people who are unwilling or unable to
produce? You can transfer your goods to them without payment—by means of one of
the transactions listed above—but if you then receive from them the goods which you
produced, in payment for the goods which you are now producing, this cannot be
designated as a “purchase” even by the sloppiest of today’s linguistic usage. And even
if we all agreed so to designate it, how long would we be able to continue producing
under a system of that kind? How would we accumulate the stock seed of production,
i.e., unconsumed goods?
If you are sick (as I am) of hearing such accusations as “Americans represent only 6
percent of the world population, but consume 54 percent of its natural resources,” ask
the accusers: “How can 6 percent of the world population feed 94 percent of it?” (This is
the ultimate intention of all international-feeding schemes.)
But the real question goes deeper than that. The real question lies in those “most
fundamental issues of population, resources, and the wealth of nations” which Mr. Lewis
mentioned, but did not discuss. Why are some nations wealthy and others not? Why do
some nations produce abundance and others starve?
The answer, strangely enough, is contained (implicitly) in Mr. Lewis’s column—and one
can see it, without any further research, if one accepts his facts as facts (which they
are).
Let us go back to the two groups of countries he lists. The “handful of [grain] surplus
countries [are] primarily the U.S., Canada, Australia, Argentina, and the Common
Market.” The “big consistent [grain] importers [are] India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan,
the Soviet Union, and China.” The surplus countries are semi-free economies, with a
century of greater freedom behind them and, in various degrees, some traditional
remnants and memories of freedom. (The exception is Argentina, a semi-dictatorship in
bad economic shape, but traditionally an agricultural country.) The grain importers,
which live under a chronic threat of hunger, are socialist and communist dictatorships.
(The exception is Japan, which, however, has never been a free country, and which is
geographically unable to develop its agriculture to any significant extent.)
The relevance of two of Mr. Lewis’s “fundamental issues” breaks down in the light of his
own lists. “Population” and “resources” do not determine “the wealth of nations.” The
countries of Europe’s Common Market are as densely populated as most of the
countries on the hunger list. Russia has greater natural resources than the U.S., but
they are untouched and unused.

It is the presence of Russia on the hunger list that blasts all modern economic theories
out of the realm of serious consideration. Under the inept government of the czars and
with the most primitive methods of agriculture, Russia was a major grain exporter, The
unusually fertile soil of the Ukraine alone was (and is) capable of feeding the entire
world. Whatever natural conditions are required for growing wheat, Russia had (and
has) them in overabundance. That Russia should now be on a list of hungry, wheat-
begging importers is the most damning indictment of a collectivist economy that reality
can offer us.
The simple, metaphysical fact—which no man-made wishes or edicts can alter—is that
individual freedom is the precondition of human productivity and, therefore, of
abundance, and, therefore, of the wealth of nations. The history of mankind bears
witness to this fact—particularly, the prosperity explosion of the nineteenth century (the
century dominated by capitalism), as against the millennia of stagnant misery under
every variant of “democratically” or autocratically controlled economy.
(If you hear it said that that prosperity was caused by an abundance of natural
resources, which are now exhausted, remember that similar allegations and dire
warnings were voiced by statists from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and
that they were prompted by the same motives. Furthermore, at the turn of this century,
there were voices claiming that all possible forms of industrial production had been
discovered and we could expect nothing but general decline. This was said before the
invention of the electric light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, the
telegraph, the movies, radio, television, atomic motors, spaceships, etc.)
The simple, metaphysical fact is that man by nature is not equipped to survive “in
nature.” His mind is his basic tool of survival, and his mind creates three life-supporting
achievements: science, technology, industrial production. Without these, he cannot
wrest sufficient sustenance from nature to fill his immediate, physical needs. In the pre-
industrial era, population control was accomplished by starvation: a periodic famine,
every twenty years, wiped out the surplus population, which the hand plows and hand
looms of Europe were unable to feed. The famines were assisted by periodic wars,
which tribal rulers waged in order to loot one another’s precarious sustenance. The
famines (and the world wars) stopped with the coming of the Industrial Revolution—and,
in the nineteenth century, the
population of Europe rose by over three hundred percent.
Today, as freedom vanishes from an ever larger area of the globe, famine is coming
back—mass famine killing off the millions of human beings whom controlled economies
are unable to feed.

In the face of a spectacle of this kind, what are we to think of those alleged
humanitarians who plead with us for help and compassion, screaming that the horror of
mass starvation supersedes all selfish political concerns? Does it?
If a self-respecting American industrialist were to declare that he cannot and will not
help the starving because his productive capacity is not unlimited and he has no desire
to descend to a Haitian’s standard of living—it is easy to imagine the howls of
indignation we would hear from today’s intellectuals. Why are they practicing a double
standard? Why do they scream that the needs of the hungry supersede our lives,
freedom, future, and all values—except their hatred of capitalism? Why do they ask us
to sacrifice everything—while they refuse to sacrifice their power lust or their mental
lethargy long enough to discover the cure, the only cure, of global starvation?
While you consider these questions, consider also the following facts: contemporary
history has demonstrated that the lives of the people, of the broad masses, have not
been improved under any collectivist system, but have been reduced to hopeless
misery. But there have been profiteers under every such system: the ruling
bureaucracy—the parasites-on-parasitism—the wretched handful of pretentious
mediocrities who, unable to compete on a free market, extort an unearned “prestige”
and a luxurious living from “the sores of the poor and the blood of the rich.”
These are the men who would let mankind starve, but will not relinquish their
power—these are the men to whom the world is being sacrificed—these, not the poor
brutes of Russia, China, or India who are perishing because the last of their meager
earnings has been plundered to support the nuclear armaments of their rulers.
It is to these rulers that we are now asked to sacrifice the last, best hope on earth: the
United States of America.
Such is the nature of altruism.