Some agreement here; some disagreement also. It is a nice theory, but it fails in many ways, and when it fails, government generally ends up trying to pick up the pieces. Government does this badly; this I will not dispute. But what would happen if nobody did it at all? Would private charity pick up the slack? No, and one of the reasons is a long tradition of historical.
We look at underclasses with a combination of pity and contempt, with some justification. Forgive me for selecting an example from the arena I know best: the worldwide underclass of the 3rd world. I have seen countless Americans and other westerners arrive in underdeveloped countries, take one short look around, and begin issuing prescriptions. The prescriptions generally revolve around accountability, people taking responsibility for their own actions, basic libertarian values. Few, if any, take the time to ask how the current situation came to be. They don't want to be told that these countries were invaded, conquered, their people forced to labor for the benefit of foreign masters. They don't want to know that anybody with charisma, leadership potential, organizational talent, was immediately and brutally removed from the gene pool. They don't want to know about educational systems designed to produce docile, civil, servants.
After a hundred or so years of this, what do you get? Then the masters have to be forced out, kicking and screaming, with no attempt at a peaceful and orderly transition. Since the masters have to be kicked out by force, the new governments are selected on the basis of military skill, not management skill, and most of them manage very badly. To top it off, the cold war spills over on those least concerned, leading cold war principals to set up and knock down governments at will, on the basis of ideological acceptability, not governance.
So we get generation after generation of externally imposed lousy government, and at the end of it we have a mess. And we deal with it by writing off the history and blaming the mess on the natives. Do we expect private individuals who know nothing whatsoever of this history to donate money to pay off the debt we owe for reducing these people to penury? They won't. The average prosperous American sees them as a bunch of small dark crazy people that burn embassies and take hostages, and are honestly and blissfully ignorant of why these things happen.
Not that I approve of government-sponsored foreign aid as it exists today. I don't. But its failings are caused less by bleeding-heart liberalism than by one reality: foreign aid exists not to help the 3rd world poor, but to sustain the foreign aid business, which is very big business indeed. How much of the foreign aid budget does anybody think actually gets to the 3rd world?
To some degree we can spill this over to our domestic situation, though I speak with much less confidence there. Do we honestly expect to solve the problems of Afro-Americans in less time than it took to create those problems?
FT would say that he wasn't the one who kidnapped their ancestors, put them into slavery, scattered their families, kept them under the heel, and stomped down their every attempt to improve themselves for several hundred years, then acknowledged their humanity and expected them to catch up in a generation and a half. And therefore he has no responsibility to work to improve their lot.
I suspect it looks different from the other side of the fence.
I rave; apologies. |
