Hat tip: Mises Daily
by Mark Thornton
Thursday, November 14, 2002
For a few billion dollars you might expect to be able to bribe some small third world country into cleaning up its act, to defend the property rights of its citizens, to provide a stable currency, and to establish a non-interventionist economic and foreign policy.
With little Switzerlands and industrial revolutions developing around the globe, the U.S. could provide the examples that would establish a classical liberal world order within one generation with less than 1% of the federal budget.
Alas, Americans are united in their opposition to foreign aid—and with good reason! Foreign aid, military aid, debt relief, economic development assistance, and even disaster assistance money—all with “strings attached” to ensure proper behavior—are associated with “fraud, waste, and abuse.”
U.S. aid designed to bring about peace in the Middle East is an ideological seedbed of hatred, war, and terrorism. The big players in foreign aid, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, are more likely to bring about economic meltdown and social calamity than economic stability.
Ludwig von Mises pointed out (Planning for Freedom) that foreign aid doesn’t create friends in foreign lands, it creates ideological enemies who wish to do us harm:
The United States, they think, is aiding them because its people have a bad conscience. They themselves pocket this bribe but their sympathies go to the socialist system. The American subsidies make it possible for their governments to conceal partially the disastrous effects of the various socialist measures they have adopted.
Mises is here referring to our “friends” in Europe, but the same could be applied to the Middle East, Africa, the Western Hemisphere, and Asia, with the only possible exception being countries like Vietnam and Australia who receive limited or no foreign aid from the United States or the international organizations that we control.
The fraud and failure of foreign aid is now so obvious that it has ended up in the pages of the American Economic Review!
You’ve seen “ER” and I’ve seen “ER” and I think we can both agree that if bipartisan health care reform were a patient, Doctor Obama would be dejectedly dropping the paddles, ripping off his mask and asking Nurse Pelosi to call it.
Oh, yeah. It’s finished. Done with. Kaput. Defunct. Deceased. Extinct. Artifacto. Fuggedaboutit. Game over, man. Part of the vast past tense. Washed up. Down the drain. Sleeping with the fishies. Sheer finito. Totally obliterated. See ya. Wouldn’t want to be ya. Pushing up daisies. Eaten by the undertoad. Down Goes Frazier! Rests in peace. Bereft of life. Shuffled off its mortal coil. Crossed the distant shore. Run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible. Stick a fork in it. It’s history. A memory. In the archives. Way gone. Say bye. Then again… you never know. Reconciliation. Such an innocent word.
With the deftness of Houdini, the president conjured up a seance where Democrats and Republicans sat down together and aired out differences like actual humans, and while the festivities conspicuously lacked any hand-holding choruses of “Kumbaya,” the two sides did refrain from physically throttling each other and nobody staggered out in full view of the cameras cradling a bloody stump. Which, for these guys, is a leap. They did, however, continue to lock out ordinary Americans by talking in a special Congressional code known as Politico-Speak. And I’m here to decipher.
by Ilona Trommler
Guest columnist of The Liberty Voice
Throughout the forty years since immigrating from Communist Hungary I watched many changes take place, political climates shift, as slowly I was beginning to recognize signs of what I knew growing up. Whenever I tried to talk to people about the changes I was noticing, they simply told me it could never happen in America!
As I am getting more politically interested and involved, realizing how we all slept through the decades while politicians took more and more liberties limiting our freedoms, I realized my story was becoming important for people to hear. It tells what is to come unless we take a stand, and force those we send to Washington to lead by that wisely written document, that allowed our country to be the best the world has ever offered. That incredible document that made this land the sanctuary to all people who ran from tyranny, and they found safety and freedom on our shores…… under the protection of the Constitution.
I often wondered why my search for freedom took me so far from my homeland, and not long ago it dawned on me, maybe the history of my country is important knowledge for America’s freedom. Maybe my story needs to be told to open eyes, and make what is happening today feel real, and more believable. Maybe I am here so I can tell what happens when a people sleep, and take their eyes off what their government is doing! I came from where we are heading, and this road was paved by tyrants!
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