Vika:
International aid, from the perspective of the US anyway, basically serves two purposes, which go hand in hand. Maybe only one purpose, but as administrations change the priority of one purpose over the other frequently changes.
One is to help developing or emerging nations to raise their standards of living. We may lend money and expertise to develop new schools. The stated purpose is to raise the educational level of the average citizen. Unstated, but just as important, is that we believe educated citizens tend to demand democracy. And I use here democracy in the most general sense, not in the sense of having the people directly run the government. Perhaps a better word would be republicanism. We believe that in the long run the world is better off if the people control their government, rather than vice versa. I know I will get a bit of flak from people who say that this isn’t what the US is about, but they’ll be wrong. While we may have problems at home with leaders who want us to move towards a semi-theocracy where certain of our hard-won liberties are proscribed, that’s a temporary aberration. We’ll get beyond it, as we have other times.
The other reason we want to help other nations to develop is, as I have said before, to make them better markets for our goods. We’re a nation of shopkeepers. We buy and sell, and we believe that as a general rule our own standard of living is raised if we have nice toys and the leisure time to enjoy them. Whether that’s for good or ill, that’s they way most of us are. Myself included. I LIKE having a stereo so I can listen to music. I LIKE having a DVD player so I can rent a movie and watch it. I LIKE having a table saw and some other tools so I can build heirloom quality furniture for my kids. I LIKE having a computer where I can communicate with others like you people here and where I can sit down someday and write the great American novel.
I hear people here and elsewhere decrying the consumerism of the average American. That’s not a meaningful lifestyle, they say. I wonder what they want me to do. Sit around and contemplate my navel? I keep asking these questions and no one gives me any answers. Perhaps it’s because the people I’m asking the questions of don’t want to admit that they may have been wrong. Like the question about the loans to developing nations.
You said “Your words . . . are an apology of all creditors . . ..” Vika, whether we like it or not, it’s money that makes society and civilization work. Money IS property, no different from a car or a house or a piece of land. The profit motive runs deep in the human psyche. Say I own a piece of land and there are several people who want a place to live. I can build an apartment block on that piece of land and rent out the apartments for people to live in. Or I can sit there and watch my raw land grow weeds.
Now, what’s gonna make me go to the trouble and expense of building those apartments? So I can give them away for people to live in without paying me something for the roof over their heads? I don’t think so. I do it because I intend to make a profit out of it.
EXACTLY the same thing happens with money. If I have a handful of gold coins sitting in a strongbox it’s doing neither me nor anyone else a bit of good. But if I lend that money to someone else to build an apartment house, then it’s doing a bunch of people a favor. I’m going to get back more money than I lent out (hopefully), the person I lent it to has the capital to build an apartment house, and the people that rent the flats have a place to live. Dolly Levi said it best, “Money’s like manure, it has to be spread around to do any good.” But should I give that money to someone to build those apartment houses so he can give the apartments rent-free to someone who wants a roof over his head? Again, I don’t think so.
But, some people say, this isn’t about individuals lending money to other countries, it’s about governments lending money to other countries. Not true. There exists no money unless people earned it. There exists no money in a government’s treasury unless the people gave it to the treasury to use. We’ll hear some people disagree and say that the government just up and took (translated STOLE) it but that’s patently not true. If enough people don’t want the government to have money all the people have to do is install a new government, or just get rid of the government entirely. WE ARE THE GOVERNMENT. When the US government lends money to another country they are lending our money. They didn’t just print the stuff.
And, as I’ve said, in the majority of the cases when the US lends money it knows it isn’t going to get it back. We spend tens of billions, no, more like hundreds of billions of dollars every year in loans to other countries that we fully intend to forgive. Basically it’s humanitarian aid. The US is the most giving country in the history of the world. And you know, I think that a great deal of the anti-American stuff you hear, particularly currently, is based on jealousy.
I know who Paul Johnson is, so I think I should warn you: take what that man says with a very large grain of salt. He believes and preaches that an out-of-control Ben Bradlee (the editor of the Washington Post during the Watergate era) railroaded an innocent Richard Nixon out of office. He believes and preaches that JFK was a gangster who was under the control of his father (perhaps only the first half of that belief is true.) He believes and preaches that FDR was a pitiful shell of a man who prolonged the Depression and fostered a world war to get the US out of it.
I’m assuming that what you said in your next-to-last paragraph came from Johnson. It misses several points. Commercial banks don’t make loans to emerging or developing nations unless there’s a loan guaranty. Way up above I talked about governments being the only ones who make the loans. Not strictly true, from a technical sense, but true from a realistic sense, since the guaranteeing government is on the hook if there’s a default or if there’s a decision made to write off the loan as humanitarian aid. So the money does eventually come through the Government from the taxpayer.
And you said that as a rule the loan proceeds are used to buy medicine and food from the US. I think you will find that’s just plain not true. Most of those loans go to building infrastructure within the borrowing country. Sometimes with less than salubrious results, I’m afraid. I recently read about how we sent money to Bangladesh or another of that tier of countries to help them drill wells for clean drinking water. Worked like a charm, except that no one noticed the water was laced with arsenic, so people are dying of arsenic poisoning rather than cholera and dysentery.
TEd
