THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VIII, Issue # 97, June 8, 2006
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN
By Alan Caruba
THE WEST & FOREIGN AID POLICY: REASONS FOR THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF EFFORTS OF WESTERN NATION-STATES
& THEIR AGENCIES & PROXIES TO PROVIDE ECONOMIC AID TO THE REST OF THE WORLD -- THE ANALYSIS OF ECONOMICS
PROFESSOR WILLIAM EASTERLY
FULL STORY:
In 1899, when England had a great empire, Rudyard Kipling penned a poem in which he called on the West to “Take up the
White Man’s burden” to seek peace in the world, end famine, and vanquish disease. Kipling assumed that the millions living
in Africa, the Middle East or India, where he had spent many years, were never going to achieve these lofty goals on their own.
In January, 2005, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, was still trying to make Kipling’s dream come true,
lamenting the tragedy of extreme poverty and the millions of deaths from easily preventable diseases. The cure, of course, was
massive foreign aid.
In a refreshing, albeit exhausting book, William Easterly, a world-weary and world-wise professor of economics, long
experienced in the great game of foreign aid, suggests that a real tragedy is one in which the West has spent $2.3 trillion on
foreign aid over the last fifty years “and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all
malaria deaths.”
The name of Easterly’s book is The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill
and So Little Good. One of the reasons is found in a headline of a mid-May Associated Press article. “Zimbabwe
Crumbling as Inflation Tops 1,000%.” At that point, a loaf of bread would have cost you 100,000 Zimbabwe dollars. You can
use their currency as toilet paper.
Zimbabwe’s problem can be summed up in two words: Robert Mugabe. In power since 1980, Mugabe has destroyed the nation,
in large part by seizing the white-owned farms and giving them to his partners in crime. Since 2000, agriculture has collapsed,
along with the overall economy that was already in free-fall. Mugabe is just one example of much of Africa’s most enduring
problem, the utter corruption of its governments, despite the end of European colonization in the 1960s.
The problem of criminal and failed governments, however, is not just Africa’s problem. The major aid institutions are forever
bailing out countries all over the world. A recent example is Mexico, as badly governed as any you will find throughout Latin
America.
In a recent Stratfor public policy intelligence report, Bart Mongoven, put forth the view that “The American public
broadly is beginning to view poverty — whether that in affluent countries or in highly indebted, poor countries — as almost
impossible to solve.” With a remarkably refreshing clarity, Americans now view poverty in developing countries “as the result
of a combination of failed states, corruption, and cultural problems.”
Mongovern warns that advocates for poverty reduction “have set about attempting to change how they talk about poverty,
and to change the way people, particularly in affluent societies, think about it.” Governments are no longer going to be
identified as the agents to end poverty. They have failed. Instead, poverty is going to be recast as “a human rights violation.”
This, of course, raises the question of whether a job is a human right. From a socialist point of view, it is.
Guess who a Liberal amalgam of do-good organizations are going to call upon to end poverty? The answer is quintessentially
capitalist multinational and other large, successful corporations.
What organizations such as Oxfam, Evangelicals for Social Justice, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have
realized is that corporations can be pressured in ways that governments cannot. This kind of pressure is already at work by
various environmental organizations that use boycotts, smear campaigns, and other tactics to hijack and divert corporate
profits to their own agendas.
Just how big is the problem of poverty in the world? Citing a variety of sources, Easterly provides the following statistics:
Almost three billion people live on less than two dollars
a day, adjusted for purchasing power.
Eight hundred and forty million people in the world don’t
have enough to eat.
Ten million children die every year from easily preventable
diseases.
AIDS is killing three million people a year and is still
spreading.
One billion people in the world lack access to clean water;
two billion lack access to sanitation.
One billion adults are illiterate.
About a quarter of the children in the poor countries do
not finish primary school.
As far back as I can remember these kinds of statistics have been the bread-and-butter of every aid organization seeking funds
to end these problems. Easterly, though, drawing on some sixteen years experience with the World Bank, has seen it all and
seen through it.
In sum, foreign aid hasn’t solved any of these problems or provided a framework in which many nations will ever achieve a
sensible economy, integrated with the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, there is a huge matrix of aid organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the
United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and countless others in the wealthy nations that still presume
they have the answers to the widespread corruption that breeds poverty. Indeed, billions have been given to nations whose
leadership is famous for corruption.
The United Nations, whose depths of corruption and failure defy the imagination, has its own panoply of agencies whose main
function, it would seem, is to hold endless conferences in plush settings, without ever solving anything.
The issues involved in foreign aid are hugely complex. However, one comes away from Easterly’s book with the distinct
impression that foreign aid is all a massive charade pursued for the self-interest of the West and exploited by what Easterly calls “the
Rest.”
One warning, however, emerges that should be heeded:
“Military intervention is too perfect an example of what this
book argues you should not do — have the West operate on
other societies with virtually no feedback or accountability.
The military is even more insulated from the interests of the
poor than aid agencies are. People don’t give reliable
feedback at gunpoint.”
“Military intervention to overthrow evil dictators and remake other societies into some reflection of Western democratic
capitalism is the extreme of contemporary utopian social engineering,” warns Easterly.
“The plan to end world poverty shows all the pretensions of utopian social engineering.” It is not that nothing should be
done, but rather what needs to be done should concentrate on good monetary policies, providing and maintaining roads,
clean water projects, medicines, and sanitation.
Accomplishing this when foreign aid providers are more in love with the “Big Plan” or ignoring the long history of its
failures defies any hope of actually achieving any real change.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Foreign Aid -- International Economic Development
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Alan Caruba is a veteran business and science writer, a Public Relations Counselor, and Founder of the National Anxiety Center, a
clearinghouse for information about media-driven scare campaigns. Caruba writes a weekly commentary, "Warning Signs," posted
on the Internet website of the National Anxiety Center, which is located at
www.anxietycenter.com.
© Alan Caruba 2006
Published with Permission of Alan Caruba
ACaruba@AOL.Com
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