To Reduce Poverty, Promote Freedom

The Daily Telegraph reports from London that British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown has called for the world's leading countries and institutions to join an "urgent" moral crusade and for "sacrifice from the world's richest countries" to, as the paper says, "end world poverty."

What follows are exhortations to action by Mr. Brown, who says his government will almost double spending on AIDS to 1.5 billion pounds within three years. He added: "What we are proposing is not unprecedented and is possible and it is similar to the Marshall plan of the 1940s but this time not to the ravaged countries of Europe but to the ravaged countries of Africa and the poorest countries of other continents."

If this sounds like LBJ-era Great Society programs, it's because it is premised on the same confidence that aid given to the poor will lift them out of poverty. This didn't work too well when administered in the U.S.A., where graft and inefficiencies are only intolerably widespread. Expanded to the world stage, such largesse is bound to aid the corrupt and illegitimate rulers of Third World countries far more than their long-suffering peoples. Whether Saddam's back-scratching with the UN's Oil-for-Food-Program, or the billions of squandered aid used by African dictators, simply handing out money through the rulers of such places enriches only those already fortunate enough to be in on the game.

While I don't doubt Mr. Brown's sincerity, for his dreams of eliminating poverty by 2015 to actually come true (I don't know how he defines "poverty"), he and his fellow world leaders would better spend their time, and their people's money, working to overthrow the dictators and autocrats whose bloody regimes have kept their people in dire straits for decades. A populace that knows nothing of the rule of law, religious freedom, private property, a free press, and other building blocks of civil society will grow richer only through dramatic, and lasting, societal changes. Poverty will never be eliminated in any one country, much less the whole world, by sacrifices of the nature Mr. Brown advocates.

Indeed, such sacrifices are painless and perfectly in line with the status quo of most nations' foreign offices. They require neither bold initiatives, risky policies, nor a determination to overthrow existing regimes. Diplomats can remain chummy with local strong men, editorialists can praise the do-gooders among us while lambasting as heartless those who think such plans ineffectual at best and terribly harmful at worst, and Western elites can congratulate themselves for their altruism.

But until we get serious about spreading liberty and empowering suffering peoples to begin constructing civil societies and free economies to lift their nations out of poverty, all the good will and moralizing of the Gordon Brown's of the world will make only the slightest move toward "solving" world poverty. Poverty in the modern world is more a symptom of poor government than a cause in and of itself. The real disease is the continued presence of brutal, corrupt regimes -- the very ones Mr. Brown's scheme would rely on to solve a problem of their own making.