Foreign-Aid Foolishness
There is no such thing as a generous government.

By Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth
March 25, 2002 9:40 a.m.

'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.