foreign aid is evil

The idea that foreign aid is a route out of poverty and political instability is not only bankrupted but a cruel and evil hoax as well."

- Walter Williams, "Foreign Aid to Africa"

I am first and foremost an ethical libertarian -- on the Natural Law side of the Natural Law/utilitarian divide, if I'm forced to choose a side (Roderick Long provides arguments why that divide is artificial, by the way) -- but one huge strategic problem with ethical libertarianism is that so many statists who are unmoved by the ethics of non-aggression dismiss libertarianism as if it were nothing more than a moral appeal against coercion.

What drives me crazy about statists (and left-statists in particular) is the fact that their ethic is self-evidently consequentialist, and yet they don't seem to give a damn about actual consequences -- just the symbolic affiliation of "caring about" consequences.

When I say that foreign aid is evil, many would assume I'm just talking about the violation of principle involved in the confiscatory source of the funding, where in fact, I'm referring to an evil that any open-eyed consequentialist should be willing to label as such.

One of the lowercase liberty posts that got the most attention last year was "aid kills" about the Live 8 scam. I felt I had to emphasize the consequence of aid (it kills) rather than ethics, but most of what I saw in response was along the lines of But we have to do something!

Walter Williams provides a very useful contrast in his most recent column -- a contrast that only the most die-hard dogmatist in the anti-capitalist camp could ignore:

Zimbabwe and Botswana

Zimbabwe provides an excellent example of why foreign aid, as a way out of poverty, is a fool's errand.[...] It has the world's highest rate of inflation, currently over 1,000 percent. [...] Unemployment hovers around 80 percent. Its financial institutions are collapsing. The specter of mass starvation hangs over a country that once exported food.

What's the cause? President Robert Mugabe blames domestic and foreign enemies, particularly England and the United States for trying to bring about his downfall. Of course, according to Mugabe, and some of the world's academic elite, there's that old standby excuse, the legacy of colonialism and multi-national firms exploiting the Third World. The drought is used to "explain" the precipitous drop in agricultural output. Then there's AIDS.

Let's look at drought and AIDS. Zimbabwe's next-door neighbor is Botswana. Botswana has the world's second-highest rate of AIDS infection, and if there's drought in Zimbabwe, there's likely a drought in Botswana, whose major geographic feature is the Kalahari Desert, which covers 70 percent of its land mass. However, Botswana has one of the world's highest per capita GDP growth rates. Moody's and Standard & Poor gives Botswana an "A" credit rating, the best credit risk on the continent, a risk competitive with countries in central Europe and East Asia.

Botswana compared to her other African neighbors prospers not because of foreign aid. There's rule of law, sanctity of contracts, and in 2004, Transparency International ranked Botswana as Africa's least corrupt country, ahead of many European and Asian countries. The World Forum rates Botswana as one of Africa's two most economically competitive nations and one of the best investment opportunities in the developing world.