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 'm
fuming because I just got done watching Jimmy Carter on CNN lobby
for more foreign aid to help the world's poor. It reminded me that
Carter is a very, very good-hearted man with a lot of very, very
dumb policy ideas. I've always contended that it was divine intervention
that allowed Reagan to derail Carter's reelection bid in 1980.
What was infuriating
was Carter's claim that Americans are being skinflints because other
nations waste far more money as a share of their GDPs than we do
on foreign aid. Carter said that the U.S. only spends 1/1000th of
our GDP on foreign aid, which is three to four times less than most
European nations spend.
This has become
the mantra of the Left: The U.S. is a rich nation of cheapskates
who won't help poor and starving people around the globe. George
Soros says the same thing. He wants the U.S. to give more than $20
billion to the IMF to lend to the developing world. This would be
the righteous thing for America to do, Soros preaches.
Before George
Soros starts sermonizing U.S. taxpayers to give $20 billion to the
world's poor, why doesn't he do this himself?
There is no
such thing as a generous government. Governments take money involuntarily
from their citizens. When the U.S. takes money from me in the form
of taxes and then gives that money to some foreign-aid bureaucrat
in Brussels, I am not being generous, I am being shaken down.
I'm sick of
foreigners and lots of homegrown folks too-Carter and Soros are
just two of a growing fraternity of 21st-century blame-America-first-ers
— who browbeat Americans for our lack of generosity simply
because we don't buy into the Left's warped utopian vision of international
development. Americans are practical people. There's one good reason
why 2/3rds of the public hates foreign aid — and want none
of it. Because it doesn't work. In fact, recent studies by Ian Vasquez
at the Cato Institute show that organizations like the IMF do more
harm than good to countries we are trying to "help." If
you want to see what foreign aid does to countries, go to Africa
or Bangladesh. Or better yet: visit Argentina.
The claims
that Americans are not helping the poor in the third world is absurd.
First, Americans are by far the most generous in the world when
it comes to private humanitarian aid to victims of earthquakes,
famines, floods, etc. We're more generous than all the rest of the
nations in the world — combined. Just look who gives to the
International Red Cross and the Salvation Army. Americans. Does
anyone ever really want to count on the French, the Swedes, or the
Dutch if they are facing a crisis?
But we also
lift up the world's poor in a more fundamental way. We develop the
drugs, the products, the inventions, the know-how that raises the
standard of living everywhere. AIDS activists complain that America
isn't pulling its weight in fighting AIDS in Africa, etc. Nonsense.
Who is going to develop the cure for AIDS? Surely not the Europeans
or the Japanese? Who developed the vaccine for tuberculosis and
polio? Those terrible capitalists in the U.S.
There are poor
people in the world because corrupt and self-serving governments
snatch away basic freedoms from their citizens. It's that simple.
Poor nations have taxes that are too high, regulations that are
too weighty, trade barriers that are too tall, and private-property
rights that are too insecure. Our fundamental message to the poor
nations of the world should be that your governments are too intrusive.
How does it make any sense to turn around and then give these governments
that are too intrusive more money? This is essentially providing
sustenance to these nations' evil captors.
Unfortunately,
that's pretty much what George Bush now wants to do. He has caved
in to the Left-wing foreign-aid establishment — both inside
and outside his own state department — and has called for another
$5 billion in development aid.
The Bush team
should know better. The best development principle is trade not
aid. But combining the steel tariffs with the new aid replenishment
announcement suggests that the Bush foreign-policy doctrine is aid,
not trade.
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