20050603-1624

The BBC currently has an article about President Bush's opposition to the United Kingdom's plan for providing debt relief to African nations.1 As I read it, President Bush is opposed not to the debt forgiveness, which is the right thing to be doing, but to the plan to sell off the IMF gold reserve to fund yet another non-governmental organization(NGO).

We do not need another NGO. We have too many of them, with too much ill-defined authority already. Both are problematic, their existence, and the ill-defined nature of their authority. Power and responsibility must be coupled and proportional, and that is exactly where these NGOs fail. For while they have the power to disburse funds, to approve or reject plans, they have no responsibility. Liberals suggest that the internal goodness of the people making up the NGO will provide the necessary balance to the power they have. That they will do the right thing simply because they care. But care alone is not sufficient. To use a trite example, care alone suggests giving a man a fish each day. Classic socialism. But we know that such a benevolent harms him, tends toward his dependence on you for a fish the next day, and the day after. It makes him subservient to your whim, which is good for neither party.

Not held responsible for the failure to improve things, the socialist approach then is to simply throw more money at it. "Yes, I know this did not work before, but it will now, because we will spend more to make it work, and because we care more now than those who tried before did." It simply does not hold true. Rather, with failure should come some cost. The loss of a job, the loss of authority for leaders of governments and companies. The need to work harder, to suffer, for men. Then the realization is forced on one that a given idea simply does not work, try another. Or if it does not, then at least the ability to implement that idea, and in doing so cause harm, is removed. Then we would stop seeing the same solutions tried endlessly, with the same failures.