To: Bill Harmond who wrote (133784 ) 10/29/2001 7:00:22 AM From: craig crawford Respond to of 164684 Aborting self-respect worldnetdaily.com Is it a good thing that we are paying our U.N. dues? I don't think so. In fact, I was one of the people in the Reagan administration who crafted the policy that withheld our contributions from the United Nations. The U.N. is an organization that reaches into the pockets of the working people of this country in order to put our money into the pockets of the rich people in developing countries. The policy we developed in the Reagan years in response to this corrupt waste was to withhold those dollars until the United Nations reformed its corrupt practices and ceased its opposition to the free enterprise approaches that could actually help poor countries around the world achieve economic well being. I think we should continue to withhold our dues today because the organization has not responded and has not reformed. Until it does, we ought to stand firm in our position that we won't take the hard-earned money of the American people and toss it away to international bureaucrats who are generally interested in doing nothing but maintaining their own comfort and security. But while the material waste and corruption that go on at the U.N. are reason enough to withhold our support, the Clinton green light for American funding of international abortionist activism epitomizes the real evil that the U.N. too often represents. I have called Bill Clinton a moral thermonuclear bomb, because of the profound damage he has done to the moral character of the American people, and particularly to our children, by the example he sets of moral degradation and self-disrespect. The return of America to the U.N. fold means that the Clinton bomb is going global. Much of the world still languishes in conditions of extreme material deprivation and suffering. But the global, if still uneven, triumph of entrepreneurial economics -- economic liberty -- that is culminating in our lifetime will dramatically improve the material condition especially of the poor. In fact, there has never been a time when the substantial alleviation of physical human suffering and want in the world was more immediately attainable. The WTO demonstrators in the streets of Seattle are right to suspect the anti-democratic and tyrannical ambitions of the global managers in the international bureaucracy. The World Trade Organization is the bid for power of global socialism, not economic liberty. But the demonstrators are wrong in failing to see that a truly free global marketplace will benefit precisely the billions of people who will raise themselves to lives of material dignity as soon as they are given the chance to do so. The material prosperity possible in the next century will arise not from "managed" global trade, but from the decline of government interference with the efforts of people all over the world to build better lives through economic initiatives over which they retain control and responsibility.