Clipping blog |
| Put Strings on Our Money and Free the World Posted: 29 Sep 2012 02:23 PM PDT
And she should hold those fund just as long as she possibly can, until the money is pried from her fingers. Look, I’m not one of those folks who thinks we ought not send out gobs of foreign aid. We are a ridiculously wealthy nation. We can afford to send a few billion dollars to countries that can use it to build or reinforce their civil societies. But (and clever readers will see what I did in that last sentence) that money should always arrive at its destination with more strings attached to it than a marionette recreation of the last ten minutes of The Blues Brothers. We, our government, gave away almost $53 billion in foreign aid in 2010 (PDF link) more than the GDP of nations like the Dominican Republic or Bulgaria (and not quite a quarter the GDP of Egypt). That is a considerable sum of money. Now look at the leading recipients of our foreign aid and consider how many of those nations have a strong and free civil society. Out of the top ten, I see one. Israel. Still, we give hundreds of millions of dollars to regimes that could care less about the welfare of their people, who use them as tools to get more money from us. We can change that with a few conditions on the money we give them. Let me suggest one such condition, a little string that could make a big difference. We ought to ask any country that takes our money to enact its own version of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. If you’ve forgotten how that reads, let me quote it for you:
In other words, no State can make a law that deprives you of what you get as a citizen of the United States. It originally protected newly-freed black citizens against laws that would strip them of voting or other civil rights; however, it easily applies to laws you might find in other countries that routinely strip citizens in good standing of their basic civil rights (*cough*Sharia*cough*). The clause (and I admit I quoted more than what is strictly considered the Equal Protection Clause, but it’ll work for the sake of the idea I’m proposing here) also protects citizens from capricious actions of a despot. If Zimbabwe (to which President Obama pledged $73 million in 2009 alone) had such a law, Robert Mugabe could not have seized farmland from thousands of citizens and driven the nation’s economy into the dumper. Tyrants who throw dissidents in prison without trial would get no money from us nor would the repressive regimes like those across the Middle East who use brute force to silence dissent. The real magic here, though, is in the part of the 14th Amendment that guarantees everyone equal protection under the law. A nation that embraced that principle could not persecute Coptic Christians; would have to protect those who wished to build a church or synagogue and worship as freely and openly as those of the state’s religion; could not countenance honor killings; and would have to protect women from rapists, could not deny them the right to vote, the ability to drive automobiles, or expose a wrist or ankle in public. In other words, our foreign aid would come with a demand that any nation that accepts our generosity also join us among the civilized nations of the world. Of course, countries like Egypt could refuse our assistance. They certainly have the right do to so. I’m sure the leaders of those nations, backed by the spineless progressive Americans who believe our free and liberal culture is no better than one that enslaves women and kills gays, would complain. So what? We have an obligation to ensure that the fruits of our labor not fund the subjugation of little girls and the rampant rapes of little boys. We have to make sure that our money goes to places where the people are protected by their governments, where their inalienable rights are guarded as fiercely as they can be, where everyone can pursue their own happiness and order their own communities as they deem right to them. Now I’m not saying freedom will break out like a patch of mint plants the year after we send out our newly-strung aid packages nor am I saying this is the only condition we should attach. It’ll take time — years, if not decades — for people who have known only tyranny to figure out they can have better. They won’t get there without help, though, and tens of millions (or in most cases, hundreds of millions) or dollars will surely help. We won’t get there, though, until we start. We have a lot of soft power. It’s time we used it.  |
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Before I get into 
, debuted at #1 on Amazon’s Political Humor list. It’s smart, scathing, and brutally honest. It’s also very funny, unless, of course, you happen to be a dyed in the wool progressive in which case it will pierce your heart. That’s fine too. Embrace the burn and come on over to the side of reason and enlightenment.
You’ll probably want to keep your hand near the volume control during at least the first half of 
so you can get it the very second it hits Amazon. He’s coming back to the show soon, perhaps in the next couple of weeks, and we’ll hear all about the new hotness then!
The entire story of the Democratic National Convention was “The Government is your Master”. To be sure, they said it more kindly and in ways that soft-pedaled the obligations and enhanced all the goodies you will get from Big Nanny for a short while, but there it is. That this message is fundamentally un-American should not need to be said, but we live in strange days and so I spent some time in 