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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (38854)	8/20/2002 8:17:09 AM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 281500

My "Libertarian" attitude is that Foreign Aid is like pounding sand down a rathole. Please expand on your thoughts. I would say that this is often the case, but not always. Aid can do a lot of good, if it's smart aid. Unfortunately, very little is. First, some distinctions: Relief aid is aid in its most elemental form: food, medicine, shelter shipped to victims of natural or manmade disaster in moments of urgent need. This is important, and indeed necessary. It's also nice, because it's simple and its effectiveness is relatively easy to evaluate. Development aid is the "teach a man to fish" stuff, money spent to promote the kind of economic development that will make further aid irrelevant. This is where we find the most controversy, the largest expenditures, and the greatest difficulty in evaluating effects. A lot of money aimed in this direction is wasted, but that does not mean that development aid is necessarily worthless. Tied aid is often passed off as one of the other two. It isn't. This is "aid" that is granted to achieve a political or economic purpose unrelated to the welfare of the recipient country. One example would be US Eximbank loans to encourage countries to buy American-made products. In this case the entity being aided is the US corporation that ultimately receives the money, not the country making the purchase, which could often have been made cheaper elsewhere. Another example would be loan guarantees to support the pork barrels of profligate dictators that we would rather keep in power for reasons of political expedience. A lot of money is spent here, and most of it goes down the rathole. I will try to expand on category #2, the controversial one, another time, have to run now.