Kenyan: Stop the Aid to Africa!

Think for a minute about what aid does to Africa. If you send them free grain then
you put African farmers out of business. If you send them free clothes then you put
African garment workers out of work. That’s why the Kenyan economist
James Shikwati says: “For God’s sake, please just stop the aid.” Here is
how the distribution of free corn devastates Africa.

He cites the distribution of corn and clothes as examples
of “do-goodism” gone wrong, hurting those it sets out to help in an
endless circle of vicious venality. Corn arrives from highly subsidized
European and American farmers. African politicians take portions of it
to distribute to their constituents. What isn’t given away is dumped on
the black market, and sold at such bargain prices that an African
farmer can’t compete, so he puts down his hoe.

So it makes complete sense that empty-headed pop star celebrities and venal
welfare state politicians should be ganging up to double aid to Africa. It’s
a marriage made in heaven.

From the
viewpoint of the twenty-first century, we know now that the “well-meaning” welfare state politicians
utterly destroyed the little platoons of charity and self-help that sustained Europe
and the United States in the nineteenth century. They turned proud independence
into muling dependency. And rock music has never
pretended to be anything other than a direct attack on society as we know it.

Go on. Read the whole thing.