The White Man’s Burden
by Alan Caruba

In 1899, when England had a great empire, Rudyard Kipling penned a poem in which he called on the West to “Take up the White Man’s burden” to seek peace in the world, end famine, and vanquish disease. Kipling assumed that the millions living in Africa, the Middle East or India were never going to achieve these lofty goals on their own.

In January 2005 Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, was still trying to make Kipling’s dream come true, lamenting the tragedy of extreme poverty and the millions of deaths from easily preventable diseases. The cure, of course, was massive foreign aid.

In a refreshing, albeit exhausting book, William Easterly, a world-weary and world-wise professor of economics, long experienced in the great game of foreign aid, suggests that a real tragedy is one in which the West has spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last fifty years “and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths.”

The name of Easterly’s book is “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.” The problem of criminal and failed governments is worldwide. The major aid institutions are forever bailing out these nations.

In a recent Stratfor public policy intelligence report, Bart Mongoven, put forth the view that “The American public broadly is beginning to view poverty—whether that in affluent countries or in highly indebted, poor countries—as almost impossible to solve.” With a remarkably refreshing clarity, Americans now view poverty in developing countries “as the result of a combination of failed states, corruption and cultural problems.”

The Aid Mafia is going to recast poverty as “a human rights violation.” Guess who a liberal amalgam of do-good organizations are going to call upon to end poverty? The answer is quintessentially capitalist multinational and other large, successful corporations.

What organizations such as Oxfam, Evangelicals for Social Justice, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have realized is that corporations can be pressured in ways that governments cannot.

Just how big is the problem of poverty in the world? Citing a variety of sources, Easterly provides the following statistics:

• Almost three billion people live on less than two dollars a day, adjusted for purchasing power.

• Eight hundred and forty million people in the world don’t have enough to eat.

• Ten million children die every year from easily preventable diseases.

• AIDS is killing three million people a year and is still spreading.

• One billion people in the world lack access to clean water; two billion lack access to sanitation.

• One billion adults are illiterate.

• About a quarter of the children in the poor countries do not finish primary school.

Foreign aid hasn’t solved any of these problems or provided a framework in which many nations will ever achieve a sensible economy, integrated with the rest of the world. It is frequently a very expensive form of bribery undertaken with taxpayer’s dollars.

Meanwhile, there is a huge matrix of aid organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development, and countless others in the wealthy nations that still presume they have the answers to the widespread corruption that breeds poverty.

The United Nations, whose depths of corruption and failure defy the imagination, has its own panoply of agencies whose main function, it would seem, is to hold endless conferences in plush settings without ever solving anything.

The issues involved in foreign aid are hugely complex. However, one comes away from Easterly’s book with the distinct impression that it is all a massive charade pursued for the self-interest of the West and exploited by what Easterly calls “the Rest.”

“The plan to end world poverty shows all the pretensions of utopian social engineering.” It is not that nothing should be done, but rather what needs to be done should concentrate on good monetary policies, providing and maintaining roads, clean water projects, medicines and sanitation.

Accomplishing this when foreign aid providers are more in love with the “Big Plan” or ignoring the long history of its failures defies any hope of actually achieving any real change.

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, “Warning Signs”, posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com.

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