More on Foreign Aid

Following up on my post earlier today, there's a new book by Christopher Coyne of the Mercatus Center on alternatives to traditional foreign aid. I can't say I've read it, but the description complemented the AEI video well enough that it seemed appropriate for posting tonight:

"In place of the dominant approach to state-led humanitarian action, this book offers a bold alternative, focused on establishing an environment of economic freedom. If we are willing to experiment with aid—asking questions about how to foster development as a process of societal discovery, or how else we might engage the private sector, for instance—we increase the range of alternatives to help people and empower them to improve their communities. Anyone concerned with and dedicated to alleviating human suffering in the short term or for the long haul, from policymakers and activists to scholars, will find this book to be an insightful and provocative reframing of humanitarian action."

AEI on Poverty and Growth - Video

"How do you take down poverty? One toy block at a time. "

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=28PJPSms_xU

In this video, AEI explores the impact of a for-profit business setting up shop in an impoverished third-world country, and makes a persuasive case that economic growth inevitably does more to lift up the poor of such countries than one-time donations or aid grants can ever do.  More on AEI's work in this area here: http://www.aei.org/module/1/economic-growth.

Free Breakfast

Another good example of feel-good policies with bad results:

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced last week that it will discontinue the free-school-breakfast plan it initiated last year.

Called "Food for Thought," the plan provides school breakfasts to about 200,000 students.
It was funded by the LAUSD and the non-profit Los Angeles Fund for Public Education, whose goal is to raise the number of participants to about 450,000 students (out of a total of 645,000 in the entire district).

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Virtually everything the Left touches is either immediately or eventually harmful. The free-breakfast program is only one, albeit a particularly dramatic, example.

Why, then, do progressives advocate it? Because it meets three essential characteristics of the left wing: It strengthens the state; it has governmental authority replace parental authority; and, perhaps most important, it makes progressives feel good about themselves. The overriding concern of the Left is not whether a program does good. It is whether it feels good.

Read the column to find out how this program missed the mark, and to benefit from Dennis Prager's insights on the classic errors of progressive programs.