Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Western aid to the Third World does not alleviate poverty

The humanitarian case for aid has been based on an analogy with the Western welfare state. The idea was that many people favour welfare to transfer wealth from the relatively rich to the relatively poor within a country, so they will favour welfare to transfer wealth from relatively rich countries to relatively poor ones.

But many commentators not necessarily hostile to foreign aid, I.M.D. Little and J.M. Clifford for example, disagreed. They emphasised that the humanitarian motive for giving aid may have justified transferring Western taxpayers' money to poor people, but not to poor governments: the latter may have no effects on the former.

With the likes of Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, Sani Abacha of Nigeria, Joseph Mobutu of the Congo, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and a host of other kleptocratic tropical gangsters in power, aid money has simply been stolen. Many African rulers rely on aid to feed their people while they destroy their livelihoods through a neglect of, and even by destroying, infrastructure.

According to New York University professor of economics William Easterly, despite more than $2billion in foreign aid being given to Tanzania for roads, the roads did not improve. What increased was the bureaucracy, with the government producing 2400 reports for the 1000 donor missions that visited each year....

But statistical studies of the effects of foreign aid on growth and poverty alleviation have not been favourable. A recent study found that foreign aid "appears to redistribute from the reasonably well-off in the West to most income groups in the Third World except the very poorest". This is consistent with the evidence from both poor and rich countries that the middle classes tend to capture government transfers. Another study found that, after correcting for the link between aid and income levels and growth, the effect of aid on growth is often negative. A survey of other such studies concludes that "there is now widespread scepticism that concessional assistance does have positive effects on growth, poverty reduction or environmental quality". In badly run developing countries, governments channel aid to small elites. Poor people in villages and shanty towns never see any aid. Infant and child death rates remain high and women still die in unattended childbirth in countries on which aid is focused.

Source

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ELSEWHERE

French Leftist rhetoric combines with capitalist deeds: "Yet Jospin, the socialist, pursued privatizations of state-owned enterprises with extraordinary vigor: during his five-year tenure, from 1997 to 2002, he privatized more than any of his "conservative" predecessors, and almost more than all of his predecessors combined. France Telecom, Air France, Cr,dit Lyonnais, Aerospatial-Matra, Banque Hervet--just some of the names of the more than 900 companies that saw shares floated on the stock market. With roughly 31 billion Euros ($40 billion) in privatization revenues, Jospin left his "conservative" predecessors, Prime Ministers Chirac (€13 billion in privatizations), Balladur (€17 billion) and Jupp, (€9.4 billion) in the dust. At perhaps no point was the irony more poignant than in 1999, when Jospin put his Communist Minister of Transportation, Jean-Claude Gayssot, in charge of ensuring a clean and proper near-majority privatization of Air France. Even as the French state continued to retain a slim majority of the shares until several years later, the symbolism was extraordinary..... The rhetoric aside, Air France's IPO took place on February 22, 1999.... In 2000, to the surprise of many American observers who had been misled by Jospin's rhetoric, his government implemented noticeable cuts in the value added tax (sales tax), the income tax, and even the corporate tax"

New "hate crimes" legislation? "With the Democrats taking control of both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives this January, we can expect the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and its pro-homosexual surrogates newly elected to Congress, to begin an aggressive push for passage of a "hate crimes" bill designed to provide federally protected status to the behavior of homosexuality.... The side-effect of this effort will be to criminalize criticism of homosexual conduct and to violate religious freedom and freedom of conscience. It is also likely that all attempts to pass a constitutional marriage amendment will be dead on arrival in the Senate. Newly-elected Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey (D) who defeated pro-family Senator Rick Santorum (R) has already indicated his plans to push for a hate crimes bill that includes "sexual orientation" and "gender identity." Casey's announcement is payback to HRC for its strong support of his race for the Senate. Gender identity, for those unfamiliar with the term, is code for an individual who thinks he is the opposite sex. (This includes cross-dressers, transvestites and transsexuals.) Sexually confused individuals will be a protected minority if Casey and his minions in the Senate have their way."

First Minneapolis `Lesbian' Fire Chief Gets Booted Over Harassment Charges: "Bonnie Bleskcheck, the nation's first openly-homosexual Fire Chief is on the verge of being fired from her post in Minneapolis. She had agreed to resign, but a city panel has rejected her closed door negotiations and is urging that she be officially fired from her position as Fire Chief. Bleskcheck has been sued by three female firefighters over discrimination and sexual harassment. A male firefighter has sued claiming he was denied advancement because he's not a homosexual. A 2003 complaint filed by another male firefighter claimed that her department gave preferential treatment to lesbians or those who associated with them."

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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