A Republican Looks At "White Man's Burden"
By Ted Baiamonte Comments: bje1000@aol.com (04/17/06)
This book by William Easterly is obviously correct in so far as it details that huge bureaucratic programs for poor people, organized by and through the UN, IMF, and World Bank, have not worked. The author's best example pertains to various malaria programs. He claims that 12 cents per person worth of malaria medicine is all that it takes to save a life, but, despite $trillions spent, most of the money has not gotten through, and millions continue to die, slowly, painfully and needlessly.
The weakness of the book lies in its small mindedness. It dares not point out that the world's love for and implementation of goofy inefficient and deadly bureaucratic programs everywhere has essentially the same effect everywhere. Welfare programs for American Blacks amounted to near genocide, Communist programs in the Soviet Union and China impoverished and killed millions, kids riot in France in the silly belief that gov't programs can guarantee lifetime employment even as unemployment rises and income continues to fall dangerously.
The main source of the idea that gov't bureaucracies can be like Santa Claus was Julius Caesar, George III, and Karl Marx, and is now the Democratic Party in the United States. The intellectual antipode to this antediluvian thinking comes from the Republican Party, also in the United States, which believes, not in gov't bureaucracies, but in law and order, capitalism, limited bureaucracy, and religious/family values. Easterly's book is wonderful in detailing the precise failings of the UN, IMF/World Bank but is ultimately politically correct, meaningless, without context, and non-actionable, having failed to trace backwards to the Marxist/Democratic origins of the particular bureaucratic cancer about which he writes so scholarly.
As to why the book does not seek to tie its findings to larger conceptual political themes:
1) Larger political themes, i.e., Democrat versus Republican, have traditionally been covered up for the sake of harmony or unity starting with George Washington who mistakenly hoped that both Jefferson (freedom) and Hamilton (govt) could both serve in his administration.
2) Many people, perhaps the author, find political controversy distasteful on a personal level.
3) The author now works in a university environment where the obvious repudiation of Democratic Santa Claus schemes would not be appreciated or even tolerated if named or labeled directly.
4) The author may be so thoroughly Democratic that even when he determined that Democratic schemes at the World Bank didn't work he may have been reluctant to admit the essential similarity with domestic Democratic schemes.
5) The publisher, much like the media in general, may have determined that a pretense to pure intellectualism or neutrality is the most efficient way to avoid alienating either Democratic or Republican customers.
6) Centuries of hiding the essential conflict in American history has created a huge independent (independent of knowledge) electorate of flip floppers that both Democrats and Republicans fear might be spooked away from them by any overt or aggressive expression of their philosophy. Accordingly a democratic respect of ignorance, in effect, has become a significant part of the Zeitgeist, with which that author and all of us have learned to live.
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