I have been arguing for more than twenty years now that capitalism is the greatest enemy that poverty has ever known. (I believe Friedman said that, or something like it.) With virtually all of the statistics on my side it was a pretty easy argument to make. Then, liberals started changing the debate, effectively saying that economic growth and even poverty reduction were not necessarily such great things. Economic growth, they reasoned, was terrible for the environment. As for poverty reduction, well, many of the people I argued with had spent plenty of time in the third world, and had seen with their own eyes people who we would consider very poor who also seemed genuinely happy. I even have one liberal friend who has come to the conclusion (I kid you not) that there is a negative correlation between wealth and happiness. She didn’t put it in those terms, but that is what she was getting at. Now I would certainly hope that economic growth being tied to improvements in infant mortality would at least get their attention, but I am likely being naïve (again). It is virtually impossible to pry someone away from their world-view, no matter how much evidence piles up against it.

Sports Illustrated's Africa aid program is "Nothing But Net", providing mosquito nets to countries with malaria problems. They decided on it for several reasons, not the least of which being that it's a program that is hard to circumvent (like food aid.) A lot of the distributors require that the kids in a family get vaccinated when they come pick up the nets, so they're protected against more than malaria.

It's not government-run. It's a program created by a capitalist corporation and funded by the voluntary subscriptions of its readers. And it works.

Who has made the West the pornography capital of the world?. The free-market leaning people or the Leftists?.

In my opinion, the theory of property that underlies the whole libertrian philosophy that says ownership is associated with development and homesteading is just wrong.
Ownership comes from the recognization. The others (neighbors or rival owners recognize you as the owner of a particular piece of land.
That you have developed or not developed it,
enclosed or not-enclosed it has nothing to do with it.
So ownership is social and is not absolute (in a real sense the Earth is Lord's) and also we are not free to do whatever we like eg. waste water or electricity just because we have paid for it.

You are right that ownership is social, but there is problem.

I learned long ago from Peter Drucker the painful truth, that in developed societies there are only two ways the important decisions get made. Either by the market or by the state.

In day-to-day practical terms the social limitations on property use turn into tangled thickets of bureaucracy and lawyers and city council meetings and politics. And rules and laws, so many laws no one knows them all and everyone is breaking the law somehow.

Which group made us the pornography capital? Both of them--they both are enemies of the idea of the state enforcing moral norms.

But I think that much more so it was prosperity that did it. Over the course of the 20th Century it gradually sunk in that we could relax the strict disciplines that had brought us out of nothing into the richest nation in history. That we had "made it," and could now loosen our belts and have some fun.

Was this good or bad? Personally I think it's been a @#$%&* catastrophe, but one there was no way of avoiding. We are going to have to discover (or fail to discover) disciplines that will enable us to deal with prosperity without succumbing to its dangers, just as we did for poverty, which has spiritual dangers of its own.

India will soon face the same dangers, Bisaal. Your economy seems to be growing very nicely!