FREE CITIES: What About Global Welfare Reform?

The Weekly Standard ^ | April 8, 2008 | Ken Hagerty

[WhyNotFreedom?]

FREE CITIES How About Global Welfare Reform? by Ken Hagerty 04/08/2008 12:00:00 AM THE END OF THE COLD WAR deprived our foreign aid system of its strategic underpinnings. No longer could official development assistance be justified as part of a global struggle between two great superpowers and their competing economic systems. Foreign aid became a more amorphous exercise, motivated by a marbled mixture of altruism, vanity, pragmatism, guilt, and noblesse oblige. Development assistance has become a global welfare system, with many of the same syndromes that afflicted America's war on poverty. In 1996 the United States scrapped the war on poverty and launched a remarkably successful reorganization of its Federal welfare system. Now, with the rise of venomous new threats to the American and the global economic system, it's time to apply the same kind of analysis that empowered Federal welfare reform to a re-thinking of our foreign aid system.

[a_different_conservative]

An interesting article and I’m glad you posted it but it has no practical value: neither McCain nor Clinton nor Obama will stop even a tiny fraction of the give-away gravy train.

From the article:’But almost in passing, during his insightful explanation of third world corruption, Easterly points out that “good institutions” are the key to resisting the corruption and racial strife that hobble so many third world economies. The institutions he lists are: the rule of law, democracy, merit-based civil service, limits on government’s ability to repudiate contracts or expropriate property, and an independent central banking system. He has hit the nail squarely on the head.’

We would be doing well to even hold back the deterioration of these institutions in our own country.