Doug Casey Quotes
Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries
Douglas Casey, Financier & Author, 1992
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
One dramatic example of this principle is that India at the end of the 20th century had more billionaires than the United States did.
Whether or not our USAID officials are tough on a bureaucracy or a government unfortunately has had little to do with whether they had used to money for services to the poor, but how the nation voted in support of the United States in the UN and engaged in other political acts perceived by the State Department and the Administration to be favorable to the United States.
His definition of foreign aid given in this quotation is a classic example of political rhetoric. It is exaggerated somewhat, but basically true. The poor in America do not really pay much in taxes that would pay for foreign aid. However the middle class does. In the foreign counties much of the foreign aid money gets siphoned off by graft and corruption which is inevitably dominated by some of the rich of the country. Even if the money is spent without any graft or bribery, materials have to be procured and labor has to be supplied and foreign rich people own the companies which make the profits selling goods, labor and services to the foreign aid projects. In some nations the rich had set up a two-tier pricing for their products and services. One for normal business and commerce; a higher one for foreign aid projects.
In many cases the American contractors hire locals in the recipient country and so a large part of the contractor’s funds actually go to the country. One virtue of this is that in many countries where the money is given to government or a local organization, there is a great deal of corruption and favoritism. Clinton is right that there is an additional cost where the American contractor takes a profit and an overhead, but very often this “waste” is far less than the waste produced by the recipient government itself or a local organization. The worst of both worlds exists when the American contractor succumbs to local pressures and government “suggestions” and does not buy from the low bidder or gives jobs to people who are not as competent as others or often not competent at all.
She was advocating the then relatively new concept of Foreign Aid.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC), an organization supposedly devoted to financing poverty elimination had supported the building of a luxury 5-Star hotels in Ghana, Egypt and several other poor nations. The construction creates jobs as does the operation of the hotel, but critics complain that the impact on poverty is small compared to the size of the investment. The fancy hotels are too expensive for the local small businessmen and women to use in their commercial development. The elites and the AID givers and NGOs of course have better—and more expensive—accommodations.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) had proposed International Development Goal Benchmarks for donor organizations which was then officially endorsed by the World Bank, the IMF and the UN. But many people thought that many of these “benchmarks” were not only invalid but exacerbated some of the problems that they were trying to fix—especially in a developing country where structural factors inhibited class mobility and the focus was on large businesses and not small and “mom & pop” enterprises that poor could aspire to and benefit from.
Douglas Robert Casey is an American writer, speculator, and the founder and chairman of Casey Research. He describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist influenced by the works of novelist Ayn Rand.
