Foreign Aid Does More Harm Than Good

In her opening case, Pro has articulated some arguments which are very convincing at first glance. She has also drawn upon common wisdom which we are predisposed to intuitively accept with quotes like “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” I applaud her effectiveness as a communicator, but lest she win readers over too quickly, I ask voters to please suspend judgment until you’ve heard both our arguments in full. I believe her case rests on some misunderstandings, which I will do my best to explain. Political Realities The choice is often not between giving a man a proverbial fish and teaching him to fish. It is between giving him a fish, and letting him starve to death. While corruption is indeed rife in many impoverished aid recipient countries, the crippling short-sightedness of our own democratic politics and leadership also perpetuates the problem. Bipartisan commissions and think tanks, stacked full of the greatest minds of our time, often come up with very good projects and initiatives. No matter. If there are immediate costs which the party in power must impose on the budget, which will not bear fruit until four to eight years later when the opposition may get to claim it as its own success, then that project is doomed. A politician who supports one condemns herself to being attacked in the next election as a “wasteful spender”, especially for a provision that directly benefits the lives of foreigners without directly benefitting domestic taxpayers. Conservatives are especially notorious for heartless opportunism in this regard [1] [2]. One way to avoid taking fire in the next election is to tie aid to getting something tangible for the United States in return. A very strong argument could be made that most American economic aid is not really meant to improve the prospects of the poor (if it does by coincidence, then great…), but rather is given to ensure the cooperation of foreign governments in pursuing American geopolitical agendas. In light of that, for the purposes of our debate topic I hardly consider it fair for my opponent to pretend that “economic aid” is “not working” when it is given, for example, to Pakistan for the blatant purpose of bribing a hostile nation into providing logistical support and access for one of our wars. Even the legislators who drafted a Pakistani aid bill admit that our goal was to get the Pakistanis to trust America, and they don’t even bother to feign naiveté with the idea that the billions of our dollars would actually be used to transform the lives of everyday Pakistanis [3]. For the purpose of our debate, I submit that “economic aid”, only makes sense to consider in the context of this debate if we examine cases where it seems as if a genuine effort has been made to help improve the prospects of the poor, rather than spending the money merely to serve American strategic interests. Even in the best cases of altruism, the effectiveness of aid programs is still often diluted by costly favoritism to American special interests [4]. I submit that it is in this territory where we should debate whether or not the good caused by aid outweighs the harm it causes. I will argue that it does. Even with the limitations - only a fraction of what donor nations promised to deliver, and tangled with political strings - foreign aid is beneficial. And if more funding were made available for the purpose of genuinely trying to lift people out of poverty and into prosperity, it could surely prove to work even better. Exhibit A Postwar Japan and Germany both received extensive foreign aid from the United States, and became Capitalistic economic powerhouses. They each had relatively high education levels, were industrialized prior to receiving aid, and were more directly under American influence postwar than the African examples we are likely to spend most of our time talking about in this debate. But even so, these examples do demonstrate that there is a case to be made for foreign aid - that there are circumstances in which it can work, and work well. Advancing from that fairly uncontroversial starting point, my argument through this debate will be to show that success isn't isolated to just those obvious examples, and that aid works in other cases as well.I thank readers for your interest, and rest my opening statement. Back to Pro. References: 1) http://www.washingtonpost.com... 2) http://dailycaller.com... 3) http://www.reuters.com... 4) http://www.economist.com...