' Women First, Prosperity for All '

The theme of the eighth Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2017 was ' Women First, Prosperity for All '. It's very catchy indeed ! But is it a sensible idea, I wonder. ' Prosperity for All ' is certainly something most desirable and a grand goal. But why ' Women First ' ? Have all men of the world exhausted their capability trying in futility to achieve the goal ? What led them to believe that women have got the calibre and capability to do what men have failed to do ? No doubt the brains behind the idea are very fertile, but, I'm afraid, they've got no idea of what, other than their apparent physical attributes, make men different, basically, from women. Further, I don't think the brains behind the idea and all those that back it are aware of the factors responsible for the prosperity of a few alongside of the poverty and privation of millions.

As I see it, the most BASIC distinction, the insuperable wall women have to overcome in order to match up to men, happens to be the fact that men are INDEPENDENT of women while women are DEPENDENT on men. Yes, women are dependent on men for their security and survival. And this is a universal truth. Nevertheless, this dependency of women on men is collective. It's not to be missed that it's NOT for nothing that I've used the plural number : ' men ' and ' women ' . The reason is this universal truth holds true collectively only. Individually, a woman may ignore any man. But that does not make her or any other woman independent of world's manhood. The fact that in matrilineal societies too, men hold the dominant position and are treated as lords in their marital relationships is in complete harmony with the universal truth of women's collective dependence on men for their security and survival, to my way of thinking. Their marriages too, like ours ( I'm talking about true marriages, not travesties in the name of marriage ), symbolise the rule of men over women.

Men can fight, kill, and protect. Men can defend themselves and their country too. Men can say boys are born to fight, play games, scale peaks, conquer seas, oceans, and deserts, discover continents, and explore the space. Men can also say boys are born to know the unknown, to discover laws, and invent things. Can women make such claim about themselves ?

Men have created great epics, compiled dictionaries, thesauruses, and have written books of grammar, history, philosophy, et cetera, all by themselves. Men are conversant with the three R's and can write poetry, prose, stories, dramas, and novels. Men are matchless in painting, sculpting, composing, dancing, collage, montage, et cetera, too. Men have discovered laws of physics and chemistry, rules and formulas of maths, the Euclidean geometry, the non-Euclidean geometry, biology, genetics, laws of economics, and so on and so forth. Agriculture, animal husbandry, engineering, medicine, architecture, mining, metallurgy, steel plants, chemical plants, power plants, and nuclear power plants are all creations of men. Men have invented ships, submarines, airplanes, war planes, copters, guns, tanks, bombs, missiles, ICBMs, nukes, nuclear reactors, rockets, satellites, spaceships, and space stations. Photography, cinematography, astronomical photography, X-ray photography, ultrasonography, colour photography, xerography, and holography are also men's inventions. Magnificent cities, awesome high-rises, broad metalled roads, marvellous suspension bridges, huge overpasses, underground railways, under-river tunnels, the Channel Tunnel, cable cars, the Pyramid of Giza, Taj Mahal, the marble wonder, the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the tallest building Burj Khalifa, et cetera are also evidence of men's unparalleled creative genius and calibre. The invention of ECG, EEG, echocardiography, MRI scans, dialysis, coronary artery bypass, open-heart surgery, organ transplantation, bone-marrow transplant, blood transfusion, plastic surgery, silicone breast implants, eyesight corrective glasses, contact lenses, stethoscopes, telescopes, microscopes, electron microscopes, et cetera are also credited to men. Men also have to their credit the invention of cloning and the IVF technique meant to create babies in the wombs of barren women. And men deserve to pride themselves on their success in all these acts without any help from women. This fact explains why men are INDEPENDENT of women.

Men can take lives. Men can lay down their lives for a noble cause as well. Men can discover laws of Nature, theorise phenomena of life and the universe, and invent means to derive benefit from these laws and and theories. Men can fight enemies and killer disease. Men can sing and dance too. Men can make both music and bombs. Not only can men make babies in the wombs of barren women, men can create wombs in their own bodies and thus conceive, as well. And men do NOT need any help from women to accomplish all these tasks.

There's truly nothing that women can do but men canNOT. Nevertheless, there happen to exist many things that women canNOT do but men CAN. As an example, I'd cite the DEFENCE of your motherland. I don't think if you're a sensible man or woman, and if you're asked to make a choice between the all-women armed forces and the all-men armed forces, you'd choose the former. Another example is the LAW & ORDER of the society you belong to. Would you stand for the idea of replacing the existing police force with an all-women police force, really ? And what about the WAR against TERROR ?

Men are also endowed with the calibre and capability they need not only to keep civilisation moving but to make it advance as well, and of course they don't need any help from women in order to accomplish these missions. Do women really have so much calibre and capability ? What if all men of your country go to sleep for an hour all together ? I can see buses, trains, trucks, and cabs are standing immobile, ships are lying idle at anchors, and no flights are available. Machines in factories have stopped working. Hospitals are without physicians, and no surgeons are present inside operating theatres. Convicted criminals have broken free from jails and engaged in wanton stealing, robbing, killing, and of course in the rampant raping spree too. And the enemy forces together with trans-border terrorists are infiltrating, like swarms of locusts, into the country. No sensible humans ought to fail to visualise the dire and horrific consequences the country will have to undergo if its manhood goes to sleep all together just for an hour.

Women are NOT , and never will they be, equal to men in terms of calibre and capability, in my humble opinion, just because the BASIC distinctions at issue, which make women DEPENDENT on men, are true UNIVERSALLY . I do not know what led them to believe that women will make better entrepreneurs than men, and that only women entrepreneurs are what they need for the realisation of their great goal of ' Prosperity for All '. I'd like to know where on earth they have run across women entrepreneurs better than their male counterparts, which fact has kindled their belief in women's entrepreneurship and convinced them that it won't prove a mirage.

Further, the brains behind the idea at issue seem outright ignorant of the political economy of POVERTY. Let me throw light on this point now.

This GREAT man invented the dialysis technique and the dialysis machine for which he received NO money from anyone. In an act of incredible generosity, Willem J. Kolff never patented his invention, and after the end of World War II he donated five of his articifial kidneys to hospitals world wide.

Money cannot measure the worth of a commodity.

By ' worth ' , I mean both the usefulness and the degree of usefulness, i.e. the quality, of a commodity. It follows from the definition of money. The immediate corollary to this thesis is the economic INQUALITY, i.e. the result of the uneven distribution of wealth and income consequent on the exploitation of wage slaves by capitalists, wage differentials, trading in commodities, etc, which lies behind the social division into the rich 1%, the super-rich 80, by Oxfam's wealth data, and the poor and penniless millions, does NOT owe its origin to qualitative distinctions between humans, between a Nobelist and a receptionist or between the work done by a skilled hand and that by an unskilled one.

Another point that carries great significance in this regard is the thesis that economic inequality reflects the FUNDAMENTAL law of the commodity economy. Commodity prices are determined by invincible laws of supply and demand. If the supply of a commodity outstrips the demand, the price of the commodity will go down. And the commodity price goes up if the demand for it outstrips its supply, when the trading in such commodities turn lucrative. The amount of profit the trading in a commodity yields depends on the gap between its supply and demand figures. When its supply outstrips its demand, the more grows this gap, the less profit it yields, and when the supply trails the demand, the more the gap grows, the more profit it brings. As the supply and demand figures of different commodities are different, trading in different commodities yields different amounts of profit. High-demand commodities sell like hot cakes to bring high returns whereas low-demand commodities yield very low returns, sometimes losses. Performances of a pop star, a movie actor or a soccer legend are phenomenally high-demand commodities in relation to services of a university professor, a successful lawyer, the engineer-designer of the longest bridge, the architect of the tallest building or a Nobelist who invented a life-saving therapeutic technique or an environment-friendly technology. This explains why people like Christiano Ronaldo's fabulous earnings put theirs or yours to shame.

Dealers in high-demand commodities amass huge wealth and grow wealthier than all those that deal in low-demand commodities. This phenomenon shows incontestably that economic inequality reflects the fundamental law of the commodity economy. And it being the very fundamental law of the commodity economy, economic inequality is irresistible in a commodity economy.

' Prosperity for All ' is certainly a grand goal. Nevertheless, this communist goal, as it appears to me, is just NOT achievable in a market economy, I'm afraid to say, just because the phenomenon of economic inequality reflects its fundamental law. It's silly to believe that women can make better entrepreneurs than men. And it's sillier to believe women's entrepreneurship will help translate this grand idea into reality.