Say Anything Blog

Far from being change, Obama’s approach to international aid is just more of the same old same old.  More of the same old some old that doesn’t work, specifically.

Does it follow that poverty persists because the amounts have been just too measly to do the job? It does for Mr. Geithner and the foreign-aid brigades. But rather than rely on those with vested interests, it’s more useful to look at the empirical evidence. A 2006 paper titled “Foreign Aid, Income Inequality and Poverty,” from the research department of the IDB itself, looked at the period 1971-2002 and found “some weak evidence that foreign aid is conducive to the improvement of the distribution of income [sic]. When the quality of institutions is taken into account, however, this result is not robust. This finding is consistent with recent empirical research on aid ineffectiveness in achieving economic growth or promoting democratic institutions.”

So now that we know it doesn’t work, Mr. Geithner wants more of it. This is what the late, great development economist Peter Lord Bauer called “the disregard of reality.” In a 1987 essay in the Cato Journal, he called the claim that poverty is a trap that cannot be escaped without external aid an “obvious conflict with simple reality.” “All developed countries began as underdeveloped,” Bauer wrote. “If the notion of the vicious circle were valid, mankind would still be in the Stone Age at best.”

I’m not sure there is any more quintessentially liberal concept than the idea that giving people things (money, entitlements, etc.) will make their lives better.  We see it with domestic policy, where liberals have assumed that giving people welfare or giving them artificial “minimum wage” raises or giving them easy-money loans will make those people better, more responsible citizens.  And we see it with foreign policy, where liberals assume that huge shipments of food, medical supplies and…uh…condoms will raise some countries out of poverty and oppression.

It’s just not true.  And in so far as the stuff liberals like to give people and/or countries accomplish anything, it merely props up the status quo by keeping the targets of the liberals’ altruism (funded with other people’s money, naturally) just satisfied enough to not want to change anything.  Corrupt kleptocrats in Africa are propped up by the billions their subjects receive in aid every year (that which said kleptocrats don’t steal in the first place) because it keeps said subjects just fed enough to avoid overthrowing them.  Same with welfare and public housing.  What impetus do people on welfare have to reach for something better when they can live relatively comfortably off the government-mandated largess of others?

None of it really accomplish anything.  Truth be told, for all the left’s trumpeting of international aid work, America’s military has done more to bring social justice to the world than all the international humanitarian groups combined.