Capitol Ideas / Every Word of It True
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS EVERY WORD OF IT TRUE by Tom Bethell Once upon a time I had tea with Kitty and Malcolm Muggeridge at their Sussex farmhouse, and the conversation soon turned to a most remarkable...
...Every word of it true...
...A new name arises just as soon as the old one begins to arouse suspicion among taxpayers...
...Bauer himself is obviously astonished at the "disconcerting hiatus between accepted opinion and evident reality" in the field of foreign aid, and he shrewdly remarks that when very widely accepted ideas are criticized, then that criticism "is at times regarded as a form of intellectual blasphemy or even moral blasphemy, when the ideas rejected are thought to embody moral precepts...
...And so on...
...By contrast, "some of the most backward countries never were colonies, as for instance, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, Liberia...
...As you can imagine, it made for delicious reading among us Daily Telegraph addicts (retired colonels, former colonial administrators, deposed mon-archs, and so forth...
...Bauer might have made more of this point...
...Bauer's arrival in the United States coincided with the publication of his new book Equality, The Third World and Economic Delusion (Harvard University Press...
...McNamara, one is tempted to digress, is fated to be wrong about everything he touches...
...The money is then disbursed by the dictator in question to maintain his palace guard and so remain in power...
...But I have often since tried to imagine his astonished Tom Bethell, The American Spectator...
...To quote Bauer at his best: advocacy and inflow of aid lends support to the idea that improvement in one's fortune depends on other people, the government, the rich, one's superiors, or foreigners...
...One of the most oppressive features of Third World aid-supported countries such as Tanzania is their high income-tax rates, taking effect at moderate income levels...
...As Bauer writes, the Third World is perceived by McNamara's Band at the World Bank as . . . sunk in poverty, helpless and at the mercy of their environment, exploited by the West, caught in a vicious circle of poverty, unable to control their own fertility, devoid of will and with little capacity for individual action...
...he exclaimed, raising a cup of (Indian) tea to his lips...
...It is because a posture of accusation is needed to maintain the necessary degree of guilt and abasement among the aid givers (who themselves, of course, welcome such accusation since it keeps them in business among other things...
...It is inconceivable, for example, that an editorial should appear in the New York Times questioning the value of international transfer payments, or casting doubt on the utility of the World Bank, or chastizing Third World countries for begging rather than reforming their own political structures in such a way as to encourage economic growth...
...Moreover, the rationale for aid is itself condescending enough to provoke hatred of the West...
...Finally, there is the debilitating inversion of effort and reward...
...There is no shortage of land in such areas as Ethiopia, the Sahel, Tanzania, Uganda and Zaire...
...it has actively interfered with economic advance in those countries...
...This is doubly surprising inasmuch as Bauer seems to have been alone in the endeavor, and the field itself is a large and important one...
...The defining characteristic of these countries is that they receive foreign aid from the West...
...Contemporary famines and food shortages occur mostly in sparsely populated subsistence economies with abundant land...
...In fact, the failure by contemporary economists to understand the crucial role of property rights in the creation of wealth is one of the principal defects of contemporary economics...
...This is essentially a reprint of the various articles he has written on foreign aid over the past ten years, but there is also quite a bit of new material...
...The school, of course, has turned out to be a prime incubator of socialism, and a principal carrier of the germs thereof to distant parts, notably the Third World...
...Such opinions are not only out of order at present, they can scarcely even be brought up for debate...
...Here again aid pauperizes the recipients...
...Moreover, "it is notable that no famines are reported from such densely populated regions of the less developed world as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia...
...Those who have not already read such Bauerian gems as "Western Guilt and Third World Poverty," (originally published in Commentary), or his articles in Encounter, and are interested in aid, ideology, and international economics should make every effort to get hold of this book...
...Robert McNamara, who fortunately retired recently as president of the World Bank, has nonetheless complained that "the greatest single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of the majority of peoples in the underdeveloped world is population growth...
...Bauer was the professor of economics-the chairman of the department!-at none other than the London School of Economics, itself founded by Kitty Muggeridge's aunt and uncle, Beatrice and Sidney Webb...
...On the other side of a vast gulf are the prosperous people of the West, partly conditioned by their environment but with a will of their own, active but malign, responsible for the plight of the world's poor but unwilling to improve it...
...Aid promotes the delusion that a society can progress from indigence to prosperity without the intermediate stage of economic effort and achievement...
...Muggeridge seemed to have been put in rare good form by the article...
...He also spoke at a luncheon organized by the Council for a Competitive Economy...
...Here is a loose interpretation of some of Bauer's arguments: There is a collection of countries called "the Third World" (also variously known as "the South," "the less developed," "the underdeveloped," or "the developing world...
...Who is this Bauer...
...The knowledge that so sensible a man as P. T. Bauer was now installed as professor of economics at the dreaded school founded by his in-laws would, I have since thought, have done much to clear away (for a week at least) the clouds of pessimism that gather so readily about the Sage of Robertsbridge...
...It is, however, stressed in another excellent volume, Bruce Bartlett's Reaganomics, published by Arlington House...
...They are encouraged to expect success without achievement, to believe that material reward depends on windfalls, and to want the results of economic success without the antecedent process...
...delight had I been able to identify the gentleman then and there...
...But he recently favored us with a visit to Washington, having been invited to speak to some clergymen by Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute...
...In his 13 years at the World Bank this supposedly brilliant man failed to grasp the most elementary feature of economics, which is that people create wealth and do not merely consume it...
...There is no doubt that we are the superior group in this scenario...
...Her opinions on foreign aid were as harmful to the Third World as they were influential in the West...
...Children continue to be regarded as a source of wealth and joy, however, not impoverishment...
...The article, by a certain P. T. Bauer, decisively refuted in as many paragraphs half a dozen prevalent ideas about the Third World: Colonial rulers didn't steal the rubber from Malaysia or the tea from India...
...Here I had an opportunity to meet the great man (he is small, feisty, exuberant, and Hungarian), grasp him by the hand, and offer both congratulations to him and condolences to the ghosts of Sidney and Beatrice Webb...
...Socialist economies demand it and nearly always receive it because they are always in such terrible shape...
...They are unanimously resentful of the West, but this is not because they were "exploited" in their former incarnation as colonies...
...the Third World cannot without massive help...
...He was wrong about the Edsel, wrong about Vietnam "body counts," and finally-in a desperate attempt to recover the esteem of the liberal-left-he is once again wrong about development, comparing "population pressures" to "the threat of nuclear war...
...Capitalist economies are always successful enough to do without aid...
...The West emerged from poverty...
...One of the worst features of aid is that it props up tyrannical regimes and oppressive (socialist) governments...
...Witness the instant canonization of the recently deceased Barbara Ward, the hortatory moralist who managed to pass herself off as an economist...
...So Bauer has had a rich field to himself, although a critique in some ways complementary to Bauer's, Wealth of Nations In Crisis, by Ronald C. Nairn, has also recently been published...
...on the contrary, they planted it there in the first place...
...Poor Mr...
...Foreign aid has somehow managed to wrap itself in such an intimidating cloak of necessity-and finality that controversy has fled...
...If Third World countries have been exploited by the West, how come those countries with little or no contact with the West turn out to be the most backward of all ? Foreign aid to Third World countries not only has done no good...
...In short they are like paupers or children...
...he then wanted to know...
...Far from the West having caused Third World poverty, Bauer adds, "contact with the West has been the principal agent of material progress there...
...Washington correspondent, holds the DeWitt Wallace Chair in Communications at the American Enterprise Institute...
...It is unusual, I think, to come across in any field such a complete and decisive demolition of the conventional wisdom...
...I can still hear Malcolm Muggeridge's voice: "Every word of it true...
...My suspicion also is that a good many of these Third World countries, especially the African ones, will never flourish economically, no matter how low their tax rates, as long as they ignore or repudiate property rights, which have formed the basis for the great economic advance in the West in the past 200 years...
...Recipients of handouts tend to hate their benefactors anyway...
...Regrettably, I had to confess my ignorance...
...Bauer is now 66 years old, and I gather recently stepped down as chairman of the LSE economics department...
...An appalling example is that of Julius Nyerere, the sanctimonious Tanzanian despot who drove half the population of his country out of their native villages, mouthed the slogans of "compassionate" socialism, ran the Tanzanian economy into the ground, stuck his paw out for more and more money, and finally ended up as Jimmy Carter's pen pal and McNamara's favorite foreign aid junkie...
...CAPITOL IDEAS EVERY WORD OF IT TRUE by Tom Bethell Once upon a time I had tea with Kitty and Malcolm Muggeridge at their Sussex farmhouse, and the conversation soon turned to a most remarkable article which had been published that morning in the (London) Daily Telegraph...
...That is to complain that there should be much more of it...
...There is only one sense in which foreign aid can be criticized in "mainstream thought" (as Bauer calls it...
...Nor can the pressure of population be blamed...
...Highly misleading per-capita income statistics create the illusion that the now-lower death rate in Third World countries causes poverty, because family income must be divided up by the larger number of dependents...
Vol. 14 • October 1981 • No. 10
