LOST IN FUN
Funafuti, Tuvalu. Welcome to FUN.
As you most likely know, airports around the world have a three-letter code in capital letters. Los Angeles for example is LAX, while Istanbul is IST. This place has the best airport code on earth: FUN. I’m lost in it again.
You first learned about Tuvalu (too-vah-loo) back in October 2013: Serendipity in the South Pacific, which I hope you can take the time to read again.
You learned how Tuvaluans persevered over incredible British vindictiveness, while maintaining a wonderful cheerfulness, rather than succumbing to anger and bitterness.
They still have that positive attitude, they haven’t succumbed, and they are still getting screwed.
The Oz-Kiwi ANZ bank, for example, operates a banking monopoly charging extortionate currency exchange rates and financial services fees – made possible by the Brits preventing Tuvalu being a part of the international banking system.
Thus all transactions are in cash – Australian dollars only – no Visa or any other credit cards are permitted.
There’s only one way in the world to get here – unless you have your own yacht or private plane – and that’s on Fiji Airways from Suva, Fiji three times a week at, again, extortionate prices. The monopoly is strangling the country.
Tourism is the world’s biggest business. Tuvalu has gorgeous beaches galore, the diving is fabulous, World War II shipwrecks are all over in shallow water. Yet there’s no PADI dive facility. There are no tourists. There’s one crummy hotel and a bunch of little homestays that are always full so you can’t get a room.
How can that be if there are no tourists? Because they’re filled with trust-fund do-gooders, international climate alarmists, and bureaucratic ilk from various NGOs – all earnestly trying to “help” with subsidized boondoggles.
One of them I met is a South Korean creating a “renewable biomass” energy plant. And just what would be the source of renewable biomass on a coral atoll? Get ready for it… wood chips barged a thousand miles from Fiji. I swear I’m not making this up.
No one ever comes here trying to create free market solutions and actual real businesses. All the do-gooders want to do is provide subsidies of various sorts paid for by their country’s taxpayers.
And there’s extraordinary danger in that.
Just as before, every Tuvaluan I talked to knows climate alarmism is a crock. Over and over I heard the same sentiment expressed by an old-timer I heard two years ago:
“So you want to know what’s really going on here, eh, Jack? Look, we live here, we’ve lived here for who knows how many generations. The ocean is our home. It’s either just a few feet away when we’re on our islands, or we’re on it and in it, fishing. We know storms and king tides and cyclones, and we’d know if something was making the ocean higher.
It’s the same, Jack, the ocean is not getting higher. It hasn’t for all our lives and our parents’ and grandparents’ lives. But… if white people want to come here and give us money because of some BS theory of theirs, who are we to say no?”
The danger is becoming dependent upon the handouts and the BS theory behind them. If you’re dependent you lose your independence. This wonderful little country with its wonderfully friendly cheerful people cannot last being strangled by a lethal combination of international monopolies and handouts.
The international bureaucracy that causes this is not just doing it to tiny little Tuvalu. It is hindering, stifling, and obstructing the freedom of people to live more prosperous lives all over the world. They, combined with their domestic brethren in Washington and every state capital, are doing the same to America.
Crony monopoly capitalism and stifling bureaucratic control are two sides of the same coin that must lose its value if any place, from Tuvalu to America, is to thrive.
I really love the people here – and I really fear for them. I’m afraid they’ll lose their joyfulness in life. Too many Americans have already lost it. It’s almost impossibly tragic. A joyful confidence in life is what characterized us as a people, it’s the essence of what made the American Dream become real for so many millions.
We’ve got to get it back. The only way I know is to tell Uncle Sam to shove his handouts up his nose, that we want our freedom instead. That starts with each one of us. There’s a lesson here in this lost land of FUN. Let’s take it to heart.
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