WarrenPeese

by Charles

There was a really good dKos diary on Africa, but my computer automatically updated Windows and re-booted, and it was lost it before I could bookmark it. Dang it! I tried to find it and failed, not realizing there are around 200 dKos diaries posted every day, and that dKos has a clunky search function. Oh, well. Another good work into oblivion. Too bad, because it was a gold nugget in a morass of angry partisanship.  [Update:  Tim found the link (thanks), and more narrative is below the fold at the end.]

A few days ago, economics professor William Easterly wrote a piece in the Washington Post titled The West Can’t Save Africa. More accurately, western governments can’t send money to African governments and expect problems to be solved. Easterly makes the case that individual Africans, with the help of accountable non-governmental aid organizations, can make significant improvements to their environs. His more expanded thesis here. An excerpt:

Seventeen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is only one major area of the world in which central planning is still seen as a way to achieve prosperity – countries that receive foreign aid. Behind the Aid Wall that divides poor countries from rich, the aid community is awash in plans, strategies, and frameworks to meet the very real needs of the world’s poor. These exercises only make sense in a central planning mentality in which the answer to the tragedies of poverty is a large bureaucratic apparatus to dictate quantities of different development goods and services by administrative fiat. The planning mindset is in turn linked to previously discredited theories, such as that poverty is due to a "poverty trap," which can only be alleviated by a large inflow of aid from rich country to poor country governments to fill a "financing gap" for poor countries. The aid inflow is of course administered by this same planning apparatus.

This is bad news for the world’s poor, as historically poverty has never been ended by central planners. It is only ended by "searchers", both economic and political, who explore solutions by trial and error, have a way to get feedback on the ones that work, and then expand the ones that work, all of this in an unplanned, spontaneous way. Examples of searchers are firms in private markets and democratically accountable politicians. There is a robust correlation (0.73) between economic and political freedom, on one hand, and economic development, on the other hand.

To describe why centralized aid plans (such as proposed by Jeffrey Sachs) don’t and won’t work, Larry White uses the Underpants Gnomes analogy, courtesy of South Park.

Gnomes Business Plan
Phase 1: Collect underpants
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit

Sachs Africa Plan
Phase 1: US taxpayers give (more) money to sub-Saharan African governments or multinational aid agencies, "directed to specific needs".
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Africa embarks on cumulative growth.

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by Charles

Last Thursday, in another lapse into Hugonoia, the Chavez goverment expelled a U.S. Embassy military official from Venezuela.  Friday, Donald Rumsfeld unhelpfully triggered Godwin’s Law, mentioning that both Chavez and Hitler were "elected legally".  Then the United States responded by expelling a "senior Venezuelan diplomat".  Over the course of his administration, Chavez has used fears of a U.S. invasion to strengthen his military arsenal, and Rumsfeld’s words will give Chavez that much more of an excuse.  Chavez is also not above triggering Godwin’s Law:

"The imperialist, genocidal, fascist attitude of the U.S. president has no limits. I think Hitler would be like a suckling baby next to George W. Bush," Chavez said from a stage decorated with a huge red image of himself as a young soldier.

Why pay attention to Venezuela?  The prime reason is O-I-L.  With the world’s fifth largest proven oil reserves, Venezuela is a geological lottery winner and, because of this, its president has more influence than he otherwise would or should have.  [Update:  To be clear, "should" is my personal opinion.]  A secure oil supply is in the United States’ national interest, and Venezuela has played a major role.  In 2004, the U.S. imported 12.8 millions barrels of crude oil and finished petroleum products per day, of which Venezuela supplied 11.8% (Venezuela is our fourth largest source of imported oil, behind Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia).  At 551 million barrels per year and prices at $60 per barrel, that means the Venezuelan goverment–via its state-owned oil company, PDVSA–receives over $33 billion in revenues from the United States (or more accurately, from oil firms in the U.S.).  Total Venezuelan oil revenues in 2005 were $85 billion, so the amount from the U.S. could be much higher.  We are dependent on oil, so therefore we are dependent on Venezuelan oil.

But looking at it another way, the United States is in Venezuela’s national interest.  The CIA World Factbook:

Venezuela continues to be highly dependent on the petroleum sector, accounting for roughly one-third of GDP, around 80% of export earnings, and over half of government operating revenues.

Venezuela produces 3.1 million barrels per day, of which 2.1 million are exported.  That means that nearly 25% of government operating revenues are financed by American-based oil enterprises, and 16% of their GDP can be traced back to the United States.  Venezuela is further invested in the United States because of CITGO, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of PDVSA, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Venezuelan goverment.  The next time you fill your tank at the local 7-Eleven, de facto CEO Hugo Chavez should say gracias to you for adding a few more petrodollars to his government’s coffers.

But rather than gracias, the sentiments Chavez expresses towards the United States are closer to vete a cingar (WARNING:  This R-rated link is not workplace safe).  Chavez’s rhetoric is virtually indistinguishable from Castro’s, and if it just stayed there, Chavez would be just another loudmouth ingrate.  And an entertaining one at that, since he apparently likes to parade American nutters through Caracas such as Harry Belafonte and Cindy Sheehan, giving them media platforms to bash Bush.  But Chavez doesn’t stop just there.

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In response to Macallan’s illuminating post on the passing of Hugh Thompson (the whistleblower who helped expose Lt. James Calley and the My Lai massacre), I wrote in comments that the war crimes we committed at My Lai were atrocious, but they paled before the atrocities of the North Vietnamese, citing as an example the slaughter of 5,500 civilians by the North Vietnamese at Hue during the Tet offensive. The American people have heard plenty of our war crimes but little of the war crimes committed against the Americans and the inhabitants of South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese communists and their southern fellow travelers. A commenter disputed my claim on the number of civilian casualties so, using the free Internet sources I could muster, I investigated.

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