In The New York Times, "Colonialism" Explains Everything
/Why, oh why, is the world so unfair and unjust? In one of the latest narratives of the left, “colonialism” has recently become the trendiest part of the explanation. Or maybe it’s the even more evil variant, “settler colonialism.”
But didn’t colonialism end just about everywhere around 60 or more years ago? Sorry, but that doesn’t matter. Something as evil as colonialism has magic tentacles that can cause injustice and unfairness and ruination extending out multiple generations beyond the time when it came to an end.
This can go to quite absurd lengths. For a good New Year’s laugh, check out this front page article from the New York Times on January 1, with the headline “In Philippines, Impoverishment Is a Legacy of U.S. Colonialism” (different headline online).
It’s certainly true that the Philippines is a relatively poor country. But then, there are plenty that are poorer, none of which were ever colonies of the U.S. This list from Wikipedia of countries ranked by per capita GDP, with data from the IMF, World Bank, and UN, puts the Philippines at 131st in the world by that measure out of 195 countries, with per capita GDP by the median estimate of $3,499 in 2022. Thus by this list there are some 64 countries that are poorer than the Philippines.
And could the poverty of the Philippines really be a “legacy of U.S. colonialism”? The Philippines initially became a colony of Spain in 1565, and stayed in that status for well over 300 years until 1898, when Spain relinquished control to the U.S. as part of the settlement of the Spanish American War. Only 48 years later, the U.S. then granted independence to the Philippines in 1946. That was well before the wave of withdrawals from colonialism by the Europeans in Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 60s.
So what exactly did the United States do in those 48 years that keeps the Philippines in poverty even today, 77 years after the end of the brief U.S. colonial interlude? The Times has the answer!
In a region defined by upward mobility through manufacturing, the Philippines stands out as a nation still heavily reliant on agriculture — a legacy of outside rule. Nearly 80 years after the country secured independence [from the U.S.], the colonial era still shapes the structure of its economy. Because the United States opted not to engage in large-scale redistribution of land, families that collaborated with colonial authorities retain oligarchic control over the soil and dominate the political sphere. Policies engineered to make the country dependent on American factory goods have left the Philippines with a much smaller industrial base than many economies in Asia.
Aha! The problems of the Philippines today, we now learn, stem from the failure of the U.S. to “engage in large-scale redistribution of land” a century or so ago, leaving a small number of families owning all the land. In this piece, that explanation is taken as gospel, without any critical examination of whether it makes any sense, let alone whether it is true. Perhaps we could pose a few questions:
Have large-scale land expropriation and redistribution programs had any notable success in reducing poverty in the places where these policies have been tried? Those familiar with the extensive history of these “land reform” programs in Latin America know that the countries where expropriations have proceeded the farthest (e.g., Bolivia, Cuba) are among the poorest countries today, while countries that halted expropriations before they got too far (e.g., Chile, Colombia) are far more prosperous today.
What has occurred in countries that never had any programs at all of land expropriation and redistribution? To take one example, the U.S. never had any such program. The percent of the workforce engaged in agriculture has nevertheless fallen from over 80% in the early 1800s to about 2% today, and the U.S. is by far the most prosperous large economy in the world. And it’s not just the U.S. — the entire “developed” world has never engaged in land redistribution.
And even if you believe that “land reform” would have been the key for the Philippines to rise out of poverty (it would not have been, but assume that it would), what exactly prevented the country from implementing such a program in the 77 years since the U.S. exited the scene?
You won’t find any of these questions addressed, let alone answered, in this article. Hey, this is the New York Times! None of this has to make any sense. It’s just mindless repetition of the favored narrative of the moment.
And to prove my point, consider the next article that appears adjacent to the continuation of the one linked above on page A8. The headline is “Life of Coconut Farmers: Born Poor, Staying Poor.” (again, different headline online). It’s a heartrending tale of the brutal life the the Filipino coconut farmer:
People labor six days a week in the tropical swelter, through torrential rains and under the punishing sun. Their pay is determined by the price of coconut oil as influenced by traders around the globe. The typical farmer earns perhaps 60,000 pesos a year — about $1,100. “We are poor here,” Mr. Limbaro said on a recent morning, as a steady drizzle turned the reddish soil to mud. “We buy only sardines and rice. For most people here, the life they are born into is the life they will lead.”
But then we suddenly come to this:
Farmers typically harvest coconuts from their own small holdings, removing the husks and selling much of the shell-encased fruit within to agents for processing plants that make juice.
Wait a minute! Now we’re finding out that these small farmers all own their own land? This after we had just been told a few inches up the same page that the reason for the poverty is the failure of the U.S. to redistribute the land causing it all to remain in the hands of a few families with “oligarchic control.”
Well, put simple consistency, along with asking of the most obvious questions, on the list of things not required in a New York Times story.
I might suggest to the New York Times reporters that if they want some real information on why the Philippines is relatively poor compared to, say, Taiwan or South Korea, they might look to things like the investment climate; or maybe to the proclivity of the Philippine government to hand out special economic favors and franchises to cronies of those in power. But then, a story on those issues would not advance the “evil colonialists” narrative.