Steven Den Beste has a great piece on the wealth redistribution behind the Earth Summit. He’s exactly right in pointing out that the whole purpose of the summit has less to do with helping the Third World than it does with shackling the First World.
You don’t make people better off by giving them handouts. Increasing foreign aid is about the worst thing that could be done for the Third World. They can’t pay back what they have already been loaned, and they clearly don’t have the skills to administer the money properly. Nor have the various NGOs been able to produce results.
The real way to life Third World poverty is through the trifecta of free trade, personal liberty, and responsible governance. The EU continues to create new protectionist trade barriers, the UN coddles dicatators across the world, and no one seems to be promoting the kind of property rights, economic transparency, and reduced bureaucracy that would actually make a diffeence in these countries.
I guess it’s just easier to blame someone else than fix your own problems, which is why the Johannesburg Earth Summit is worth absolutely nothing.
