The American Dream of a Cheetah

Substack cited CEI’s Julian L. Simon Awardee

In the next few days Magatte will receive the Julian Simon Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. She is one of the most deserving people I know because of her belief in the resource of human ingenuity that Julian Simon treasured so much as well—belief in the power of entrepreneurship and ingenuity to push us all forward and, specifically, her continent of Africa. In Africa, human ingenuity has been depressed because of decades of misleading policies, like the embrace of socialistic ideas and too much international aid that hasn’t been effective because it ultimately destroys human ingenuity and dignity as people rely on the international donor community and other countries, instead of fostering more localism and bottom-up solutions based on entrepreneurial job creation.

Julian Simon’s famous bet with Paul Elrich was about resource scarcity around the world and how much the price of certain commodities wouldn’t go up in the next few decades, because of the power of human ingenuity. For her side, Magatte is also betting on human ingenuity, she’s betting, with whoever wants to take that bet, that Africa can and will be a prosperous continent where people will be able to pursue and find their fullest human potential. Magatte is betting that Africa will flourish. As she has been living in the United States now for about half of her life, I dare to say that seeing Africa flourish is her own American Dream.

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