Liberals, Conservatives and Aid

David Brooks editorializes in NYT Karl Rove has his theories about what separates liberals from conservatives and I have mine. Mine include the differences between Jeffrey Sachs and George Bush. Jeffrey Sachs, as you may know, is the Columbia University economist who has done more to put poverty in Africa atop the global agenda than anybody else. He has hectored and lobbied the developed world to forgive debts, set goals and increase aid to ameliorate the suffering of the extremely poor.... One of the striking features of his book is the absence of individual Africans. There is just the undifferentiated mass of the suffering poor, trapped in systems, and Sachs traveling around the globe prescribing treatments. Sachs is also a materialist. He dismisses or downplays those who believe that human factors like corruption, greed, institutions, governance, conflict and traditions have contributed importantly to Africa's suffering.

Of course he downplays corruption, because like most liberals he approves of corruption. He wants to spend a lot of government money with the hope that his friends will be able to get most of it. As the pig said in George Orwell's Animal Farm: "all animals are equal, some are just more equal than others".

Instead, he emphasizes material causes: lack of natural resources, lack of technology, bad geography and poverty itself as a self-perpetuating trap. This gives him an impressive confidence on the malleability of human societies. Though $2.3 trillion has been spent over the past 50 years to address global poverty, without producing anything like the results we would have hoped for, Sachs is sure that with his insights, and most important, with more money, extreme poverty can be eliminated with one big, final push. "We can realistically envision a world without extreme poverty by the year 2025," he writes. "Ending the poverty trap will be much easier than it appears," he declares. Sachs, who tends to regard anyone who disagrees with him as immoral,

Sounds like a Democrat

is contemptuous of the Bush administration. The Bush folks, he charges, have failed the poor.

The Bush administration has nearly doubled foreign aid, but it will not spend the amounts Sachs wants. The Bush folks, at least when it comes to Africa policy, have learned from centuries of conservative teaching - from Burke to Oakeshott to Hayek - to be skeptical of Sachsian grand plans. Conservatives emphasize that it is a fatal conceit to think we can understand complex societies, or rescue them from above with technocratic planning. The Bush folks, like most conservatives, tend to emphasize nonmaterial causes of poverty: corrupt governments, perverse incentives, institutions that crush freedom. Conservatives appreciate the crooked timber of humanity - that human beings are not simply organisms within systems, but have minds and inclinations of their own that usually defy planners. You can give people mosquito nets to prevent malaria, but they might use them instead to catch fish. Instead of Sachs's monumental grand push to end poverty, the Bush administration has devised the Millennium Challenge Account, which is not dismissed by Sachs, but not heralded either. This program is built upon the assumption that aid works only where there is good governance and good governance exists only where the local folks originate and believe in the programs. M.C.A. directs aid to countries that have taken responsibility for their own reform.

Which is exactly as it should be. As Benjamin Franklin said: "God helps those who help themselves."

Betsy Newmark blogged With stories about how Nigeria leaders have stolen or misused 220 billion pounds of foreign aid over the past 40 years, enthusiasm for the traditional types of aid that Sachs recommends is waning. It seems that Bush's plan for aid to Africa could be improved, but he is on the right track to tie aid to good goverance. The American people are tremendously generous and, I believe, would be willing to pour massive aid into Africa but only if the money is going to help the poor not the corrupt leaders. We've had four years of enriching the leaders; let's try something different.

Orrin Judd blogged The real difference isn't that between Mr. Sachs and George W. Bush, a Southern Christian conservative, but between Mr. Sachs and Mr. Brooks himself, a liberal Jewish neocon. The hostility Mr. Brooks demonstrates here towards intellectualism, materialism, Reason and the Enlightenment is what makes America generally and American conservatism in particular unique.