You're correct that amassing all the wealth in the world, divvying it up equally, and passing it out to everyone won't work.
But I think your view of letting free enterprise run rampant is the exact opposite of that idea, and will work just as well at "lifting" those who are in a more desperate situation. Not only does free enterprise destroy cultures and local economies just as badly as your example, it tends to poison the planet we live on at a rate we just can't ignore anymore.
Not to mention, our economy is growth-based. Most of our growth comes from exploitation of other countries...pumping our wealth into their country (arbitrage, as another comment put it). Eventually, when those countries are no longer third-world, and a hamburger there costs $10 like it does here, the companies exploiting the cheap labor there move to the next third-world shithole.
What happens when all the third-world shitholes are gone, though? Our growth economy runs out of fuel to grow. On top of this, as populations find equilibrium with our amount of resources (and resource distribution mechanisms) there will be even less people to exploit at our current rate of growth.
I believe, in the next 50-100 years, our growth economy will collapse because the people driving it believe that growth is infinite, and the resources that drive it (developing nations/growing populations and all the resources that they require) are also infinite.
The entire thing is based on an equation that doesn't balance. We're scrambling to get to the top of a mountain that will crumble. Free enterprise won't solve this, in fact, it's only accelerating the need to find an economic system based on equilibrium, not growth. Whether that means private/public/mixed ownership, socialism/UBI/etc, we need to start thinking now about how to fix this.
Pretty much all of this. And I'd add that we not forget about sovereign debt, which is another lever for exploiting poor nations (think World Bank and IMF). So, we're not just pumping wealth into poor nations to extract more wealth; we're billing them for the privilege. That is, we're really pumping debt into these countries.
It's a racket. And it is not a flaw in the machinations of the free market; it is the definition of our current free market.
But I think your view of letting free enterprise run rampant is the exact opposite of that idea, and will work just as well at "lifting" those who are in a more desperate situation. Not only does free enterprise destroy cultures and local economies just as badly as your example, it tends to poison the planet we live on at a rate we just can't ignore anymore.
Not to mention, our economy is growth-based. Most of our growth comes from exploitation of other countries...pumping our wealth into their country (arbitrage, as another comment put it). Eventually, when those countries are no longer third-world, and a hamburger there costs $10 like it does here, the companies exploiting the cheap labor there move to the next third-world shithole.
What happens when all the third-world shitholes are gone, though? Our growth economy runs out of fuel to grow. On top of this, as populations find equilibrium with our amount of resources (and resource distribution mechanisms) there will be even less people to exploit at our current rate of growth.
I believe, in the next 50-100 years, our growth economy will collapse because the people driving it believe that growth is infinite, and the resources that drive it (developing nations/growing populations and all the resources that they require) are also infinite.
The entire thing is based on an equation that doesn't balance. We're scrambling to get to the top of a mountain that will crumble. Free enterprise won't solve this, in fact, it's only accelerating the need to find an economic system based on equilibrium, not growth. Whether that means private/public/mixed ownership, socialism/UBI/etc, we need to start thinking now about how to fix this.