[PJ-Comix]

Rush was talking about Bono and Africa yesterday. What Bono and idiotic liberals like Krugman won't face is the fact that the GOVERNMENTS in Africa skim most of the foreign aid money and/or food aid. Let's use the example cited by Krugman. A well doesn't cost all that much and provides great benefits. However, it costs a small fortune if FIRST a whole bunch of government bureaucrats have to be paid off. As Rush said, the BIGGEST cause of poverty in Africa is their very governments themselves.

[AppyPappy]

Bono loves to spend other people's money.

[Dales]

a dime a day per American

Of course, Krugman would never support a tax of a dime a day on every American.

[anniegetyourgun]

Where's the barf alert? And when was the last time Mr. Krugman sent some of his own money to Uganda?

[ikka]

Nutty article.

If a new well which might have cost $900 to put in is so good for the villagers, why can't the WHO and other people who get our money show thousands upon thousands of such wells in villages everywhere?

Reason: they don't want to spend the money on low and slow style projects, they want the big win, high dollar stuff.

[PJ-Comix]

Someone should flag this idiotic Krugman article to Rush. He was talking at length about Bono and Africa yesterday and made the point that the REASON for poverty in Africa is the CORRUPTION of their GOVERNMENTS. They skim off most of the foreign aid money for their own pockets.

[Semper Paratus]

Rush was talking about Bono and Africa yesterday.

Bono was confusing the Consitution with the Statue of Liberty inscription.
Please stick to the music making.

[N. Theknow]

Two things.

1. Africa is one of, if not the richest continent in the world.

2. Giving African nations foreign aid is like paying reparations for not enslaving them.

[randita]

I get very confused by the messages of liberals. When you watch nature shows, invariably there is a bias against the intrusion of western ways on the peaceful, nomadic simple life of natives in various parts of the undeveloped countries. Liberal celebrate the facts that these people live in squalid huts, eat all kinds of vermin and lack personal hygiene, but yet it's claimed that they are the truly happy among us. We're the ones who have it all wrong.

Yet these same liberals, like Bono, want us to spend untold trillions to modernize and westernize the undeveloped world.

The only conclusion I can draw is that liberals want us to stay in a perpetual state of guilt. Guilt that we're doing too much, guilt that we're not doing enough--guilt...guilt...guilt.

That's the only way to make sense out of the mixed messages liberals send and I've just chosen to ignore them.

[finnman69]

Hey Krugman, why don't we just get taxed at a 99% rate so we eliminate all the world's problems? What?...You say that is not reasonable? Well, why is not reasonable to expect better results with the staggering amount of money we give for foreign aid each year? I mean have you not been harping and harping for months on how the economy cannot afford deficit spending? You think we should spend more now? HELLLOOOOO KRUGMAN!

How about you take your $50,000 in Enron consulting fees you eagerly took and donate it to an African charity that will surely spend every penny on helping people (sarcasm off).

This is going to be the liberal RAT attack. We are too cheap and tax cuts=death and suffering for Africans.This is so pathetic considering all of the hoopla about the deficit.

[Jethro Tull]

PAUL O'NEILL:
JUST ANOTHER EMBARRASSING REPUBLICAN

[DoughtyOne]

Was that pro-Bono?

[Cleburne]

We could roll back the ban on DDT. That would save many lives and cost very little- and surely the liberals, who care about mankind so much, wouldn't mind.

[Bikers4Bush]

The problem is that we've stopped letting evolution take its own course and these days civilizations that should crumble and become extinct are being propped up by others.

Let the people of Africa figure it out for themselves and if they can't then maybe mother nature thinks they shouldn't be around anymore.

[Still Using Air]

"If the excess over $5 million were taxed at pre-2001 rates, the average taxed family would be left with $10 million — which doesn't sound like hardship to me — and the government would collect $20 billion in revenue each year. But no; the whole tax must go."

  So, unless I misunderstand (entirely possible), this guy sees nothing wrong with the government collecting 1/3 of the value of the property, simply because HE feels that $10M should be enough for anyone? ~whew~

[FITZ]

Whose money is he wanting to send? I don't care how much of his own money he sends to Africa ---but he can take his grubby hands out of my pockets.

[FITZ]

As Rush said, the BIGGEST cause of poverty in Africa is their very governments themselves.

Rush is right, the biggest cause of poverty anywhere is almost always because of the kind of government they have.

[Migraine]

Yeah, send us mo' money; the prez and his family bank account are really becoming quite niggardly. And, oh yeah, do send some mo' U.N. observers -- that last bunch was deeee-licious.

[GregoryFul]

But when asked to give up revenue equal to twice that cost, in order to allow each of 3,300 lucky families to collect its full $16 million inheritance rather than a mere $10 million, we don't hesitate.

What a commie!

[Kermit]

Foreign Aid has proven itself to be counter-productive. It grows the governments in those countries, which then repress, suppress and oppress their people.

Here's the key to real economic progress:

These people who write on third world development are so friggin' stupid, they haven't learned anything in 50 years. They've been coming up with magical thoughts for 50 years on "development". State planning was the solution. Exports were the solution. Democracy was the solution. World Banks loans to governments were the solution. Aid is still the solution according to Bush and his latest scheme. Now, they pretend that "globalization" was the solution.

But they are blind. They write about ending poverty, without ever talking about property.

Poverty = lack of wealth
Wealth = property
Ending poverty = getting property in the hands of the poor.

D'oh!

Here's the way to go about it. I recommend to everyone to read this book, it'll open your eyes and immunize you against the type of nonsense in this article.

Click Here for page at Amazon.com.

The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
by Hernando De Soto, Hernando De Soto

Our Price: $16.00


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Paperback - 288 pages 1st edition (August 2002)
Basic Books; ISBN: 0465016154


In-Print Editions: Hardcover (1st)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: 23,363
Popular in: Latin America (#13) , Peru (#8) . See more

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
It's become clear by now the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in most places around the globe hasn't ushered in an unequivocal flowering of capitalism in the developing and postcommunist world. Western thinkers have blamed this on everything from these countries' lack of sellable assets to their inherently non-entrepreneurial "mindset." In this book, the renowned Peruvian economist and adviser to presidents and prime ministers Hernando de Soto proposes and argues another reason: it's not that poor, postcommunist countries don't have the assets to make capitalism flourish. As de Soto points out by way of example, in Egypt, the wealth the poor have accumulated is worth 55 times as much as the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including that spent on building the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam.

No, the real problem is that such countries have yet to establish and normalize the invisible network of laws that turns assets from "dead" into "liquid" capital. In the West, standardized laws allow us to mortgage a house to raise money for a new venture, permit the worth of a company to be broken up into so many publicly tradable stocks, and make it possible to govern and appraise property with agreed-upon rules that hold across neighborhoods, towns, or regions. This invisible infrastructure of "asset management"--so taken for granted in the West, even though it has only fully existed in the United States for the past 100 years--is the missing ingredient to success with capitalism, insists de Soto. But even though that link is primarily a legal one, he argues that the process of making it a normalized component of a society is more a political--or attitude-changing--challenge than anything else.

With a fleet of researchers, de Soto has sought out detailed evidence from struggling economies around the world to back up his claims. The result is a fascinating and solidly supported look at the one component that's holding much of the world back from developing healthy free markets. --Timothy Murphy --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Industry Standard
"An increasingly important economist provides a fascinating lesson in why capitalism works by looking at the places where it doesn't." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all editorial reviews...

[robertpaulsen]

"By the way, the United States currently spends 0.11 percent of G.D.P. on foreign aid; Canada and major European countries are about three times as generous."

The recipient of aid doesn't care about percentage of GDP. He cares about raw dollars! So, Bono wants the US to match Canada? France? Spain? Well, he's got my vote!