Más de un tema que ya tocamos varias veces por acá en castilla

Esta vez en inglés para que practiquen un poco. Qué se yo, a veces en mi frustración (por no decir calentura) me pregunto si mucha gente no termina de entender estas cosas en parte porque las lee en inglés y no le entran en la cabeza:

Outside of market freedom, nothing appears able to back privation into a corner -- so completely, even, that we in the industrialized world can think of privation as a curiosity, and -- dangerously -- conclude that it's easily abolished. It isn't. The way out of privation is narrow, and it took us nearly forever to find.

Yet privation is what nature gives us. Mother Nature is not, contrary to myth, a generous woman. She doesn't give us pencils, and not even fruit or vegetables in any great quantity. She gives us fairly demanding nutritional requirements that we've only recently managed to meet, as a species, with anything like adequacy. She gives us malaria, smallpox, and dysentery. She gives us this horrible urge to reproduce, whether the kids will live happily, or suffer, or die miserably. She gives us illiteracy, and ignorance, and intuitions about the natural world that may have been useful as hunter-gatherers but that take us not a single step beyond.

Nature is utterly cruel and ungenerous, and yet markets can overcome it, and that's why a solar-powered calculator for a dollar is so wonderful.

(Gracias, Mariana)