Foreign aid goes from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. ~Rand PaulFaced with the militant peoples of the ex-colonial territories in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, imperialism simply switches tactics. Without a qualm it dispenses with its flags, and even with certain of its more hated expatriate officials. This means, so it claims, that it is ‘giving’ independence to its former subjects, to be followed by ‘aid’ for their development. Under cover of such phrases, however, it devises innumerable ways to accomplish objectives formerly achieved by naked colonialism. It is this sum total of these modern attempts to perpetuate colonialism while at the same time talking about ‘freedom’, which has come to be known asneo-colonialism. ~Kwame Nkrumah
In international relations,aid (also known asinternational aid,overseas aid, orforeign aid) is – from the perspective of governments – a voluntary transfer of resources from one country to another.
The test for aid topoor nations is therefore whether it makes them capable of being productive. If it fails to do so, it is likely to make them even poorer in the – not so very – long run.
Dean Acheson,Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969).
That's where all the foreign aid (which might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries) went as well. TheU.S. government still squanders about $20 billion a year this way, and European governments spend proportionally even more; it's all gone straight down a giant rathole.
Well, I was myself recently also inAfghanistan, and I sat down with the mothers in these displacement camps aroundKabul. And I asked them, “What about the future? What do you think of the future?” And they told me very clearly, “We believe we will starve and freeze to death this harsh winter, unless there is an enormous aid operation coming through and unless there is a public sector again that is able to provide services.” It is as acute as that. Forty million civilians were left behind when theNATO countries went for the door in August.
Money should not go to the military political group called theTaliban that took power by force. The money should go to the people, and it is possible. So, number one, there has to be trust funds, as we call it, that is held byU.N. agencies, that funnel money directly to the hospitals, that you just showed, where people are dying at the moment. It can go straight to theteachers that were on the payroll of theWorld Bank previously, can go straight to them. So, the money can go through us, international organizations, straight to the people. Secondly, unfreeze those funds that will enable banks to function again. At the moment, we cannot even buy relief items in Afghanistan. We have to ship them over, take them over fromPakistan andIran, which means thatemployment is dying in Afghanistan. And thirdly, donors, come down from the fence. See that we are there. We are reliable channels for funding. The money will go to the people. Transmit funding, not just come with pledges. This will not becomeSwitzerland in a long time. You have to share the risk with us to save lives this winter.
Yet the Americans did more than just equip themselves for total war. They also equipped their Allies. It is well known that the system of Lend-Lease provided a vital multi-billion pound economic lifeline toBritain. Net grants from the United States totalled £5.4 billion between 1941 and 1945, on average around 9 per cent of UKgross national product. Less well known are the vast quantities of material that the Americans made available to theSoviets. All told,Stalin received supplies worth 93 billion roubles, between 4 and 8 per cent of Soviet net material product. The volumes of hardware suggest that these official statistics understate the importance of American assistance: 380,000 field telephones, 363,000 trucks, 43,000 jeeps, 6,000tanks and over 5,000 miles of telephone wire were shipped along the icyArctic supply routes to Murmansk, from California toVladivostok, or overland fromPersia. Thousands of fighter planes were flown along an 'air bridge' fromAlaska toSiberia. Nor was it only hardware that the Americans supplied to Stalin. Around 58 per cent of Soviet aviation fuel came from the United States during the war, 53 per cent of all explosives and very nearly half of all thecopper,aluminium and tyres, to say nothing of the tons of tinned Spam - in all, somewhere between 41 and 63 per cent of all Soviet military supplies. American engineers also continued to provide valuable technical assistance, as they had in the early days of Magnitogorsk. The letters 'USA' stencilled on the Studebaker trucks were said to stand for Ubit Sukina sina Adolf - 'to kill that son-of-a-bitchAdolf.' The Soviets would have struggled to kill half so manyGermans without this colossal volume of aid.
Niall Ferguson,The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 529-530
In spite of half a century of effort, our society—and still more our world—is still disfigured by gross unfairness. ...Concern is indivisible and so isselfishness. A society which says "to hell withfamine anddisease inBangladesh, it's all their own fault, isn't it?" is extremely unlikely to balance this with compassion and justice for its own pensioners and its own low-paid.
Roy Jenkins, speech in Worsley, Lancashire (11 March 1972), quoted inThe Times (13 March 1972), p. 4
Is this Nation stating it cannot afford to spend an additional $600 million to help the developing nations of the world become strong and free and independent—an amount less than this country's annual outlay for lipstick, face cream, and chewing gum?
John F. Kennedy, remarks at the dinner of the Protestant Council of the City of New York, November 8, 1963.The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 842.
Our foreign aid program is not growing in size, it is, on the contrary, smaller now than in previous years. It has had its weaknesses, but we have undertaken to correct them. And the proper way of treating weaknesses is to replace them with strength, not to increase those weaknesses by emasculating essential programs. Dollar for dollar, in or out of government, there is no better form of investment in our national security than our much-abused foreign aid program.
Note: This speech was prepared but never delivered in the wake of President Kennedy's assassination.
The methods ofneo-colonialists are subtle and varied. They operate not only in the economic field, but also in the political, religious, ideological and cultural spheres.Faced with the militant peoples of theex-colonial territories inAsia,Africa, theCaribbean andLatin America,imperialism simply switches tactics. Without a qualm it dispenses with its flags, and even with certain of its more hated expatriate officials. This means, so it claims, that it is ‘giving’ independence to its former subjects, to be followed by ‘aid’ for their development. Under cover of such phrases, however, it devises innumerable ways to accomplish objectives formerly achieved by naked colonialism. It is this sum total of these modern attempts to perpetuate colonialism while at the same time talking about ‘freedom’, which has come to be known asneo-colonialism.
Kwame Nkrumah, "The mechanisms of neo-colonialism,"Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of imperialism (1965)
Foreign aid goes from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
Rand Paul,[1], Speech at University of Kentucky (March 27, 2013).
I think we are for aiding our allies by sharing of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creatingbureaucracy, if notsocialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We are helping 107. We spent $146 billion. With that money, we bought a $2 million yacht forHaile Selassie. We bought dress suits forGreek undertakers, extra wives forKenyan government officials. We bought a thousandTV sets for a place where they have noelectricity. In the last six years, 52 nations have bought $7 billion worth of ourgold, and all 52 are receiving foreign aid from this country.
We have tried to make it clear that the United States is not just an old cow that gives more milk the more it is kicked in the flanks.
Dean Rusk, secretary of state, testimony, May 4, 1967. Foreign Assistance Act of 1967, hearings before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, 90th Congress, 1st session, part 4, p. 844 (1967).
One of the most ridiculous defenses of foreign aid is that it is a very small part of our national income. If the average American set fire to a five-dollar bill, it would be an even smaller percentage of his annual income. But everyone would consider him foolish for doing it.
Thomas Sowell,Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999).
In short, countries with inefficient economies and corrupt governments are far more likely to receive foreign aid than to receive investments from people who are risking their own money. Put differently, the availability of foreign aid reduces the necessity for a country to restrict its investments to economically viable projects or to reduce its level of corruption.
Thomas Sowell,Basic Economics, 4th ed. (2010), Ch. 22. Overview
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