European social democrats and American and Canadian liberals regard foreign aid to developing countries as conscience money—shamefully inadequate recompense for centuries of exploitation and despoliation. “But if conscience money is what foreign aid is all about,” writes Melvyn B. Krause, author of Development without Aid: Growth, Poverty, and Government (New Press/McGraw-Hill Inc., $17.95), “social democrats do not have to make scapegoats of their ancestors. They have done plenty on their own to feel guilty about.”
The less-developed countries of the Third World, Krause argues, are victims not of their rapacious capitalist neighbors to the north but of the anti-capitalist ideologues (themselves as much a product of northern culture and industrialism as string quartets and Ford cars) who hold their rulers in thrall and whose malign effects on the senile economies of the north are finally being felt by the infant economies of the south. “The major theme of the book,” he urges,
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