Live 8: Es el Estado, estúpidos (III)

Seen in Gapingvoid ("cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" by hugh macleod):

"a mind numbing sea of well intentioned self-importance"

This was drawn yesterday, while I was watching Live8 on the TV. Go figure.

Walter Williams asks for Freedom, Not Foreign Aid, For Africa

The worst thing that can be done is to give more foreign aid to African nations. Foreign aid goes from government to government. Foreign aid allows Africa's corrupt regimes to buy military equipment, pay off cronies and continue to oppress their people. It also provides resources for its leaders to set up "retirement" accounts in Swiss banks.

What Africa needs, foreign aid cannot deliver, and that's elimination of dictators and socialist regimes, establishment of political and economic freedom, rule of law and respect for individual rights. Until that happens, despite billions of dollars of foreign aid, Africa will remain a basket case.

For Andrew Bernstein, Capitalism Is the Cure for Africa's Problems

What Africa desperately needs is to remove the political and economic shackles and replace them with political and economic freedom. It needs to depose the military dictators and socialist regimes and establish capitalism, with its political/economic freedom, its rule of law and respect for individual rights. And to accomplish that, it first needs to remove the philosophic shackles and replace tribal collectivism with a philosophy of reason and freedom. The truly humanitarian system is not the Marxism espoused by Western intellectuals but the only system that can establish, as it historically has, the furtherance of life on earth: capitalism.

Thomas Sowell says "The Tragedy of Africa: Local Tyranny Subsidized by Western Paternalism"

Whatever damage European colonialism did to Africa during its relatively brief reign, that was probably less than the damage done later by well-meaning Western would-be saviors of Africa. Africans do not need to be treated as mascots but as people whose own efforts, skills, and initiatives need to be freed from the tyranny of their leaders and the paternalism of Western busybodies.

Also by Sowell "The Tragedy of Africa: Foreign Aid and Debt Forgiveness"

Promoting dependency and irresponsible borrowing is not the way to help the poor internationally any more than these are ways of helping the poor at home. Such policies benefit the bureaucracies that administer foreign aid and enable vain people to see themselves as saviors, even when they are doing more harm than good.

Tags: argenblogs