To: Lane3 who wrote (22145 ) 8/15/2001 2:50:35 PM From: Win Smith Respond to The British Empire would probably be as good a model as you could get. My understanding is that it was in general well run, with a lot of the administration delegated to the local population. I think in general, British colonies did better post-colonially than anybody else's.nytimes.com .And as I stood there, I started to get mad -- not just about the tragedy in Africa but also about a budget debate that was then going on in Congress. We have something tremendously special in America, I thought, but if we want to preserve it, we have to pay for it and nurture it. Yet, when I listened to the infamous 1994 class of freshman Republicans -- and when I hear echoes today, with the likes of the House majority leader, Dick Armey, boasting that he has traveled abroad only once -- I heard mean-spirited voices, voices for whom the American Government was some kind of evil enemy. I heard men and women who insisted that the market alone should rule. And I heard lawmakers who seemed to believe that America had no special responsibility for maintaining global institutions and stabilizing an international system that benefits us more than any other country. And as I thought about all this on the tarmac of Kigali airport, I said to myself: ''Well, my freshman Republican friends, come to Africa. It's a freshman Republican's paradise.'' Yes sir, nobody in Liberia pays taxes. There's no gun control in Angola. There's no welfare as we know it in Burundi and no big government to interfere with the market in Rwanda.
