Free Republic

Reviving the foreign-aid racket -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: June 15, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 Creators Syndicate Inc. "Debt Cut Is Set for Poorest Nations" was the headline in Sunday's Washington Post over the lead story. "The world's wealthiest nations," wrote Paul Blustein, "agreed yesterday to cancel more than $40 billion in debts that some of the world's poorest nations owe to international lenders – a move inspired by the belief that full debt forgiveness is necessary to give those countries a chance to escape the trap of hunger, disease and economic stagnation." Sounds wonderful. Alan Cowell's story in the New...

In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer wrote: "The discontent generated by backward countries by their contact with Western civilization is not primarily resentment against exploitation by domineering foreigners. It is rather the result of a crumbling or unmaking of tribal solidarity and communal life. ...The Western colonizing powers offer the native the gift of individual freedom and independence. They try to teach him self-reliance. What it all actually amounts to is individual isolation. It means the cutting off of an immature and poorly furnished individual from the corporate whole and releasing him, in the words of Khomiakov, "to the freedom...