My Beauty Best Teacher

At the TED Blog George Ayittey responds to questions about Dambisa Moyo's provocative book Dead Aid:

If you want to help American farmers, you ask them what sort of help they need and whether such assistance is working. Why don’t Americans ask Africans what type of aid they need and whether the aid Americans have provided is working? So what is wrong with an African, Dambisa, telling Americans that the foreign aid they are providing isn’t working and it is “Dead Aid”?...[continue reading]

A review of the upcoming book by Dambisa Moyo-Dead Aid:

Dead Aid analyses the history of economic development over the last fifty years and shows how Aid crowds out financial and social capital and directly causes corruption; the countries that have caught up did so despite rather than because of Aid. There is, however, an alternative. Extreme poverty is not inevitable. Dambisa Moyo also shows how, with improved access to capital and markets and with the right policies, even the poorest nations could be allowed to prosper...[continue reading]-Global Investor Bookshop

The FT Interviews Dambisa Moyo author of Dead Aid she suggests:

...a telephone call from every donor nation to every aid-dependent government in Africa, warning that in five years the taps will turn off. This, she believes, would trigger the search for alternative financing on a commercial basis, and force governments to create conditions in which business would thrive.

On Celebrities:

“Most Brits would be irritated if Michael Jackson started offering advice on how to resolve the credit crisis. Americans would be put out if Amy Winehouse went to tell them how to end the housing crisis. I don’t see why Africans shouldn’t be perturbed for the same reasons,”...[continue reading]

In reviewing Wangari Maathai's The Challenge for Africa and Zambian Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid Francis Fukuyama argues that:

Both women see sub-Saharan Africa's fundamental problem not as one of resources, human or natural, or as a matter of geography, but, rather, as one of bad government. Far too many regimes in Africa have become patronage machines in which political power is sought by "big men" for the sole purpose of acquiring resources—resources that are funneled either back to the networks of supporters who helped a particular leader come to power or else into the proverbial Swiss bank account. There is no concept of public good; politics has devolved instead into a zero-sum struggle to appropriate the state and whatever assets it can control.

He concludes:

...both at least focus on the real core of the problem, which is the region's level of political development. In this realm, solutions are going to have to come from within the region itself. It is a positive first step for the discussion to shift away from what the outside world owes Africa and toward what Africans owe themselves.

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• Bright Continent (nytimes.com)

Kishore Mahbubani author of "Can Asians Think?" offers his ten rules for developing countries:

I. Thou shalt blame only thyself for thy failures in development. Blaming imperialism, colonialism, and neo-imperialism is a convenient excuse to avoid self-examination.

II. Thou shalt acknowledge that corruption is the single most important cause of failures in development. Developed countries are not free from corruption, but with their affluences they can afford to indulge in saving and loan scandals.

III. Thou shalt not subsidize any product, nor punish the farmer in order to favor the city dweller. High prices are the only effective signal to increase production. If there are food riots, thou shalt resign from office.

IV. Thou shalt abandon state control for free markets. Thou shalt have faith in thine own population. An alive and productive population naturally causes development.

V. Thou shalt borrow no more. Thou shalt get foreign investment that pays for itself. Thou shalt build only the infrastructure that is needed and create no white elephants or railways that end in the deserts. Thou shalt accept no aid that is intended only to subsidize ailing industries in developed countries.

VI. Thou shalt not reinvent the wheel. Millions of people have gone through the path of development. Take the well-traveled roads. Be not prisoners of dead ideologies.

VII. Thou shalt scrub the ideas of Karl Marx out of thy mind and replace them with ideas of Adam Smith. The Germans have made their choice. Thou shalt follow suit.

VIII. Thou shalt be humble when developing and not lecture the developed world on their sins. They listened politely in the 1960s and 1970s. they no longer will in the 1990s. [still relevant in 2000s]

IX. Thou shalt abandon all North-South forums, which only encourage hypocritical speeches and token gestures. Thou shalt remember that countries that have received the greatest amount of aid per capita have failed most spectacularly in development. Thou shalt throw out all theories of development.

X. Thou shalt not abandon hope. People are the same the world over. What Europe achieved yesterday, the developing world will achieve tomorrow . It can be done.

via State of Flux

Thanks Gilbert Porku!

photo courtesy The Globalist

Juan Williams was on Sean Hannity today discussing President Obama's economic and domestic policies, and when push came to shove and facts and figures and data and evidence was cited, he fell back on the same argument that liberals and progressives always fall back on when the results of their policies prove to be harmful to poor people, minorities, and the groups in society that need the most help- he fell back on the argument that for all of the government's faults, at least it was taking wealth from rich people and redistributing it as charity to poor people.

Liberals and progressives, who have seized the old Democratic Party and are now running it as a communist organization, believe that one of the primary roles of the new United States of America is to use the power of the state to distribute charity to those who need it. But their actions and beliefs are in fact resulting in less money and wealth going to the people who need it in society because the government is THE SINGLE WORST charitable organization in the world, having considerable overhead, being motivated by politics and not need, and full of corruption and graft.

CATO, in a report that, although dated, still gets to the heart of the matter, said:

Private charities have been more successful than government welfare for several reasons. First, private charities are able to individualize their approach to the circumstances of poor people in ways that governments can never do. Government regulations must be designed to treat all similarly situated recipients alike. Glenn C. Loury of Boston University explains the difference between welfare and private charities on that point. "Because citizens have due process rights which cannot be fully abrogated . . . public judgments must be made in a manner that can be defended after the fact, sometimes even in court." The result is that most government programs rely on the simple provision of cash or other goods and services without any attempt to differentiate between the needs of recipients.

Take, for example, the case of a poor person who has a job offer. But she can't get to the job because her car battery is dead. A government welfare program can do nothing but tell her to wait two weeks until her welfare check arrives. Of course, by that time the job will be gone. A private charity can simply go out and buy a car battery (or even jump-start the dead battery).

The sheer size of government programs works against individualization. As one welfare case worker lamented, "With 125 cases it's hard to remember that they're all human beings. Sometimes they're just a number." Bureaucracy is a major factor in government welfare programs. For example, a report on welfare in Illinois found procedures requiring "nine forms to process an address change, at least six forms to add or delete a member of a household, and a minimum of six forms to report a change in earnings or employment." All that for just one program.

In her excellent book Tyranny of Kindness, Theresa Funiciello, a former welfare mother, describes the dehumanizing world of the government welfare system--a system in which regulations and bureaucracy rule all else. It is a system in which illiterate homeless people with mental illnesses are handed 17-page forms to fill out, women nine months pregnant are told to verify their pregnancies, a woman who was raped is told she is ineligible for benefits because she can't list the baby's father on the required form. It is a world totally unable to adjust to the slightest deviation from the bureaucratic norm.

In addition to being better able to target individual needs, private charities are much better able to target assistance to those who really need help. Because eligibility requirements for government welfare programs are arbitrary and cannot be changed to fit individual circumstances, many people in genuine need do not receive assistance, while benefits often go to people who do not really need them. More than 40 percent of all families living below the poverty level receive no government assistance. Yet more than half of the families receiving means-tested benefits are not poor. Thus, a student may receive food stamps, while a homeless man with no mailing address goes without. Private charities are not bound by such bureaucratic restrictions.

Private charity also has a better record of actually delivering aid to recipients. Surprisingly little of the money being spent on federal and state social welfare programs actually reaches recipients. In 1965, 70 cents of every dollar spent by the government to fight poverty went directly to poor people. Today, 70 cents of every dollar goes, not to poor people, but to government bureaucrats and others who serve the poor. Few private charities have the bureaucratic overhead and inefficiency of government programs.

Democratic policies are increasingly being defended on 'charitable' grounds, from healthcare policies to economic policies to environmental policies, but the truth of the matter is that government is a poor method of distributing charity. Instead of relying on government and its horrible charitable giving, all of these programs should be ended and the money spent on them should be returned to citizens. Even if a small percentage of this money was given in charity, then it would be more successful than government programs, and as long as there are a lot of conservative Republicans around, we can be sure that a good percentage of money will be donated and not a small percentage (according to studies, liberals don't donate to charity- they feel superior by taking money from you and giving that to charity).

Image via Wikipedia In Vanity Fair Peter Godwin writes about the 'The Crocodile' Robert Mugabe, and his battered country:

The tragic irony of Zimbabwe is that what is today a hellish country should by all evidence be a paradise. Its high, malaria-free interior is a magical place: sweeping vistas of long tawny grasses slope up to the mountain ranges of the eastern highlands; in the north the land falls sharply down to the Zambezi River, which tumbles magnificently over the Victoria Falls. Zimbabwe is blessed with rich, loamy soil. Beneath it lie generous seams of gold, chromium, coal, iron, and diamonds. At independence in 1980, Mugabe inherited a sophisticated, well-maintained infrastructure. The black middle class grew fast, and Zimbabwe enjoyed the highest standard of living in black-ruled Africa.
But that was yesterday. The most recent World Values Survey shows that Zimbabweans are today the world’s unhappiest people. Their economy has almost halved in size in the past 10 years. The unemployment rate is more than 80 percent. About half of all Zimbabweans are reliant on food aid. Some 20 percent of the population is afflicted with H.I.V./aids. Zimbabwe today has the world’s shortest life span—the average Zimbabwean is dead by age 36 (down from age 62 in 1990). As a result the country now has the highest percentage of orphans on the planet...[continue reading]

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As the children play in the White House, the adults in Iran are up to no good. Victor Davis Hanson keeps our attention on this important subject in his article Voting Present on Iran:

Iran just announced a radical expansion of its uranium-enrichment facilities. The news followed the recent disclosure of the country's previously secret nuclear facility near the city of Qom -- and came just two days after the International Atomic Energy Agency's censure of Iran for its failure to halt enrichment.

In other words, instead of complying with international requests to stand down, Iran has decided to step up efforts to enrich uranium, which, despite the government's denial, is all but certainly intended for a bomb.

Iran's theocratic leaders promote its pathological hatred of Israel. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust. He periodically threatens the Jewish state with abject destruction, calling Israel "a dead rat" and "a stinking corpse." At best, his nuclear missiles would be a permanent sword of Damocles over Israel's head. At worst, in apocalyptic fashion, he could claim for Persian Shiites the primacy of radical Islam by destroying, once and for all, the "Zionist entity."

Iran also gives billions in aid to murderous organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas. Their clout would grow exponentially if they could scare Western allies with the threat of nuclear terrorism.

Apparently Iran has watched this new kindly American approach -- and come to a few dark conclusions: namely that a handful of nuclear bombs will give Iran political leverage, and that, in this new climate, it is well worth the (decreasing) risk in getting them. Rightly or wrongly, it seems to assume that the new repentant American administration is more interested in reaching out to prior adversaries than pressuring them to respect the current global order.

President Obama's serial deadlines and hope and change rhetoric have had no effect on the Iranians. Obama can either accept that the theocracy will go nuclear and live with it, or he must take graduated steps to stop them.

Lost amid all the debate about Obama's domestic policies like socialized medicine, nationalizing companies, massive debt-fueled pork give-aways, and the capping and taxing of America's energy consumption is that Iran is getting closer and closer to obtaining a nuclear bomb. Iran getting the nuclear bomb would be very bad for the world. They will use it to blackmail our allies and expand their control over the Middle East, they might use it to murder millions of Jews, or they could sell it to terrorist groups who would unleash it on an American city. This is a big deal.

As big a deal as it is, what has Obama's response been? Offering to talk to Iranian officials? Backing the Iranian government as it killed and terrorized pro-democracy groups that tried to rise up in freedom and liberty? Issuing declarations that are ignored? Those aren't very strong steps and are not having a positive effect on the situation. Different steps need to be taken and different messages issued. Perhaps Obama can do these things, but I'm pretty sure that we are going to need a different Congress and different President or else Iran will mushroom cloud an American city.

Yesterday, in The Coming Tax Assault I: 2011 Destroyed by Tax Increases on Everyone I wrote:

2011, regardless of what happens in the 2010 elections, will be a bad year for America due to the avalanche of tax increases that will hit everyone, specifically dead people, married people, rich people, investors, poor people, those with kids, those who save, those who buy medications, and small businesses. New tax increases of varying amounts will be levied on these groups starting in 2011, and the result of these tax increases will be lower spending, lower saving, lower investment, lower business activity, and increasing hiding of taxable income by those that can, with the end result being falling revenues to the government and less economic activity. That will mean less jobs, less income, and a lower quality of life for you. The blame for this can be laid 100% on politicians, namely anyone who voted for Obamacare and anyone who refused to vote to make permanent the 2001 tax cuts, both of whom are almost all Democrats and who are all liberals.

My post yesterday focused on what is going to happen when the death tax comes back and when the 2001 tax cutes expire. Today I will focus on all the other tax increases that Democrats in Congress and under President Obama have implemented to take more of your wealth from you.

Via Investors Business Daily, the "second wave" of hikes, as Americans for Tax Reform puts it, are designed to pay for ObamaCare and include:

• The 'Medicine Cabinet' Tax, which includes reducing the amount that Americans are able to put in their personal health savings accounts or flexible spending accounts and a tax on health reimbursement pretax dollars used to purchase nonprescription, over-the-counter medicines (except insulin).
• The 'HSA Withdrawal' Tax. This increases the additional tax on nonmedical early withdrawals from an HSA from 10% to 20%.
• 'Brand Name Drug' Tax. Makers and importers of brand-name drugs will be liable for a tax of $2.5 billion in 2011. The tax goes to $3 billion a year from 2012 to 2016, then $3.5 billion in 2017 and $4.2 billion in 2018.
• 'Economic Substance Doctrine' Tax. The IRS is now empowered to disallow perfectly legal tax deductions and maneuvers merely because it judges that the deduction or action lacks 'economic substance.'
• 'Medicare Tax'. A new 3.8% Medicare tax begins in 2013.
• Finally, there is the tax (Obama said it wasn't a tax but now in court he says it is a tax) on Americans who decline to buy health care insurance.

These taxes are directly responsible to anyone who voted for Obamacare, which takes property from hard-working Americans in the form of higher taxes in order to provide government-healthcare to others- and I want to remind you that government-healthcare has death panels in it and funds abortions.

There are other taxes, so many to even discuss, as a result of a disastrous several years of Democratic control of the Congress and Presidency, that include alternative minimum tax's widening net, tax hikes on employers, the loss of deductions for tuition, the deletion of dozens of tax brakes, teachers won't be able to deduct their classroom expenses, employer-provided educational aid will be restricted, and thousands of families will no longer be allowed to deduct student loan interest.

These tax increases are all going to start to kick in over the next several years and all will grow in size as time goes on. These tax increases will hammer the US economy, sucking the life out of it by stealing property from those who earn it and giving it to those who are politically connected in society. Tyranny will increase as a mobster-like government redistributes wealth to chosen favorites, and the best and brightest realize that they would be better off ingratiating themselves to a mob-government than building new products or offering new services. The incentive to work and work hard will be less because if you do you'll be punished and if you don't you'll be rewarded. Our society will grow less wealthy, less moral, and less successful.

And it will all be because you or your friends or your family voted Democrat somewhere on the ticket somewhere in the recent past. The only hope, and it is a faint one, is that large conservative Republican majorities at every level of government will mitigate and lessen the damage of all of these taxes.

Celia W. Dugger in the NYTimes:

The fight against corruption in Africa’s most pivotal nations is faltering as public agencies investigating wrongdoing by powerful politicians have been undermined or disbanded and officials leading the charge have been dismissed, subjected to death threats and driven into exile.
“We are witnessing an era of major backtracking on the anticorruption drive,” said Daniel Kaufmann, an authority on corruption who works at the Brookings Institution. “And one of the most poignant illustrations is the fate of the few anticorruption commissions that have had courageous leadership. They’re either embattled or dead.”

More Here

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Michael Knox Beran writes in City Journal:

In one area, foreign aid, the paternalist spirit is far from dead. A new generation of economists and activists is calling for a “big push” in Africa to expand programs that in practice institutionalize poverty rather than end it. The Africrats’ enthusiasm for the failed policies of the past threatens to turn a struggling continent into a permanent ghetto—and to block the progress of ideas that really can liberate Africa’s oppressed populations....If the prosperous nations really want to help Africa, they need to resist the seductions of paternalism. They need to promote, not policies that will ensure that the continent remains a collection of fiefdoms dependent on subsidies and celebrity pity, but wealth-generating entrepreneurial efforts. They need to export, not a dated philosophy of mandarinism, but ideas that really can lift peoples and nations out of the lower depths—the ideas of Bacon, Hayek, de Soto, and The Wealth of Nations.

via the Anglers Rest
photo courtesy of Getty Images/Stringer/AFP

Yesterday I watched Russia - Land of the Tsars, a History Channel production that told the history of the Tsars of Russia from Peter the Great to Nicholas II. Russia has an interesting history, and no matter how many times I've studied it or investigated it, I always come out a little more confused- as Winston Churchill once said "Russia is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." That being said, the people of Russia are people too, and one theme that is common to all people is the desire for human liberty and freedom and the desire of other people to control and use other people. The struggle for life, liberty, and the protection of property that one earns from ones labor is a struggle that transcends nations and peoples, and while I watched this production I was reminded again of this struggle.

Tsars in particular were fascinating to me- Alexander I and Alexander II. Both had a chance to move Russia towards a liberal moderate constitutional monarchy, but both were defeated in these efforts by well-meaning democrats and socialists, who instead moved Russia closer to communism and fascism through their actions. This is frequently the case- some people work actively to defeat moves in the right direction because they are not the 'perfect' direction to move, without understanding that an oblique move is still a move forward.

After the assassination of spoiled and rotten Paul I, his son Alexander I became Tsar and he represents in his one person both the inclination for entitlement and elitism and a desire for control over others that he learned from his father and also a sense of enlightenment and a recognition of the worth of others and the inclination for liberty that he learned from his tutors and his grandmother Catherine II the Great. During his time as tsar, he struggled to reconcile these two competing belief systems. He moved Russia closer to a constitutional monarchy, put in place a Council of Ministers, allowed the serfs more rights, and attention to a more balanced budget all marked him in his early in his life as a liberal reformer who did things to improve the life, liberty, and protection of property of the people of Russia. But Alexander I was badly shaken by a revolutionary conspiracy among the officers of the guard around 1816, and by a foolish plot to kidnap him on his way to the Congress of Aix-la-Chapell in 1818- both undertaken by well-meaning democrats who were unhappy with the pace of change and so decided to speed things. After these incidents, Alexander I was forced to back away from liberalism and stopped reforms, and the moment passed, and his brother and successor Nicholas I reversed much of these actions and was greatly repressive, all because some made perfect the enemy of good.

Nicholas I was one of the most reactionary of all the Russian monarchs, and it is during his reign that we can see what happens when human liberty is not encouraged, when private property is not protected, and when life is respected. Although he ruled for 30 years and was successful in maintaining power and in enlarging the size of Russia, it is during his reign that Russia falls farther and farther behind the rest of the world in military power and economic production, and it is during his reign that the seeds for the future terror that was Lenin and Stalin were put in place. The hallmarks of his administration were abolishing local government, increasing censorship, increased government control over major industries, increased power of the national government, increased taxes, and ran up the national debt. The result- industries lagged, the industrial revolution avoided backwards Russia, revolution and unrest simmered, and the Russian military was embarrassed in the Crimean War. Bribe-taking, theft and corruption were everywhere.

With the death of Nicholas I in 1855, the Russian crown passed to his eldest son, Alexander II. There was little in Alexander II's upbringing or character to indicate that he would be one of the greatest reformers in the history of Russia, but sometimes when people who are good are given a chance, even if they are not perfect, they surprise you. And surprise Alexander II did- he ended the Crimean War, began to clean up the crony capitalism that ran rampant in government, lowered taxes, filled the treasury, exploited natural resources, encouraged business development, emancipated the serfs in 1861, rebuilt the military, put in place a new judicial system, greatly simplified civil and criminal procedures, encouraged rule of law, empowered local police, moved more power to local governments, and generally acted with more humanity towards everyone he dealt with. He was not perfect, but did much to advance human liberty, protect property from capricious actions by government, and protect the lives of people from the state. But there were some who felt that he didn't go far enough often enough, and these radicals, raised in the oppression of Nicholas I's reign, were not just conservative democrats, but instead the more dangerous kinds of revolutionaries, socialists, who sipped the Kool-Aid and truly believed that a better world could be made by using the state to redistribute wealth, control industries, and pick winners and losers in society. They dogged Alexander II, repeatedly trying to assassinate him, until eventually they were successful and killed Alexander II in March of 1881. Alexander II was followed by a conservative and repressive Alexander III and Nicholas II, who did little to return to the agenda that Alexander II had put in place prior to his death.

One of those who were part of the plot to kill Alexander II was Alexander Ulyanov, who was very much looked up to by his younger brother, a young community activist known as Vladimir Lenin. One wonders what might have happened if Alexander I or Alexander II might have succeeded in their attempts to move Russia forward- perhaps it would not have slid backwards and fallen victim to the awful atrocities that were the reigns of Lenin and Stalin, and the millions in dead might still be alive and prosperous today.

Sometimes good is good enough, and even if some Tsars were not perfect, they did advance human liberty, protect property, and protect human lives from the excesses of the state. It is important that we take time to learn about them so that we may learn some lessons from them and apply those lessons to our own nation and to our own choices of who should be governing our nation.

The video can be found at Russia - Land of the Tsars.