Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
U.S. cash flushes just fine in Somalia
U.S. cash flushes just fine in Somalia
Apr 26, 2025 12:56 AM

Yesterday it was announced by the State Department that the United States will provide an additional $105 million in aid to famine-stricken East Africa (we had previously contributed $405 million to fight drought in the region). Vice President Biden’s wife has just returned from a humanitarian visit, where she visited a camp of starving refugees and met with Kenyan leaders who are dealing with an influx of famished Somalis. Said Jill of her trip,

One of the reasons to be here is just to ask Americans and people worldwide, the munity, the human family, if they could just reach a little deeper into their pockets and give money to help these poor people, these poor mothers and children.

And another U.S. official: “Hundreds of thousands of kids could die.”

Somali Militiaman

This is madness. The United States has funneled untold millions of dollars into Somalia over the years, and the situation is exactly the same: the country is so war-torn that aid we send doesn’t get to the children it’s supposed to help. According to Transparency International, Somalia is the most corrupt country in the world. The U.N.’s top humanitarian officer in the country admitted that aid reaches only 20 percent of needy Somalis, although in the capital, he said, the situation is better; there aid reaches about half the city’s inhabitants.

But there’s a deeper problem—one that the U.N. official doesn’t see, even though he’s surrounded by the data. It shouldn’t be that 50 or 60 or 70 percent of Somalis are considered perpetually “in need,” to be propped up by colonialist aid from the U.S. and Western Europe. In fact, it is exactly that dependent relationship that has rendered Somalia helpless in the face of drought. (Compare it with Texas, for example, where a majority of the state’s crops have beenseverely damaged by a record drought.)

The question arises then, what if we didn’t send the aid? To be frank, we don’t know the answer to that—the European Union and other countries also send substantial amounts to Somalia, but no one really knows how much food gets to refugees. All that Jill Biden can say is, “There is hope if people start to pay attention to this.”

Somalis don’t need another 20 years of U.S. handouts. They need a civil society and the opportunity to enter into exchange with the developed world. As easy as it is for America to throw money at their problems, that kind of aid can’t really help.

For more on Acton’s solution to global poverty, visit www.PovertyCure.org, where you can sign our Statement of Principles and hear from people who have made a difference in Africa.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Threat to Freedom
Over at the Liberty Law Blog, there is an excellent post titled “Ronald Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Dialogue of Liberty” by Alan Snyder. Snyder delves into the influence Chambers had on Reagan and how their worldviews differed as well. Many conservatives and scholars felt Chambers’ prediction that the West was on the losing side of history in the battle against Marxism collapsed after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. For many, the ideas of Chambers...
Constitutional Cases and the Four Cardinal Virtues
Should virtue be a consideration in judicial decisionmaking? Indiana Law Professor R. George Wright makes an intriguing argument for why the four cardinal virtues could be useful in interpreting constitutional cases: Judges typically decide constitutional cases by referring to one or more legal precedents, rules, tests, principles, doctrines, or policies. This Article mends supplementing this standard approach with fully legitimate and appropriate attention to what many cultures have long recognized as the four basic cardinal virtues of practical wisdom or...
Lord Acton and the Power of the Historian
Looking through my back stacks of periodicals the other day I ran across a review in Books & Culture by David Bebbington, “Macaulay in the Dock,” of a recent biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay. The essay takes its point of departure in Lord Acton’s characterization of Macaulay as “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.” As Bebbington writes, “Acton, a towering intellectual of the later 19th century, was at...
Is Work a Curse?
Is work a curse, a result of mankind’s fall from grace? Not according to the Book of Genesis. As Hugh Whelchel, Executive Director of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, explains, what Adam was called to do in the garden is what we are still called to do in our work today: Humanity was created by God to cultivate and keep God’s creation, which included developing it and protecting it. You see, we were created to be stewards of...
How to Steal a Bike in New York City
Edmund Burke didn’t really say it, but it still rings true: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. In a test of this maxim, filmmaker Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around New York City and finds that most people do nothing about it—even when it’s done right in front of a police station. I recently spent a couple of days conducting a bike theft experiment, which...
Integral Human Development
The Journal of Markets & Morality is planning a theme issue for the Spring of 2013: “Integral Human Development,” i.e. the synthesis of human freedom and responsibility necessary for the material and spiritual enrichment of human life. According to Pope Benedict XVI, Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility. (Caritas in Veritate 17) There is a delicate balance between the material and the...
Obamacare’s Religious Rubes
The White House has a plan to mobilize prayer vigils in front of the Supreme Court in defense of Obamacare. It was reported that the administration met with leaders at non-profit organizations and religious officials who support the new health care law. The court takes up the constitutional test of the health care mandate in a couple of weeks. The mandate has now been challenged in 26 states. Cue the same stale big government religious prophets who confuse statism and...
Italy’s Tax Man Takes Aim at the Vatican
Kishore Jayabalan, the Acton Institute’s Rome office director, was interviewed by the Zenit news agency in an article titled, “Is Taxing the Church a Real Solution for Italy?” In the article, Jayabalan discusses the history of the Italian state and its imposition of property taxes on the Roman Catholic Church’s land holdings, residences and non-profit businesses. Sometimes in the past, particularly under Napoleonic rule and before the Lateran Pacts, the institution of property tax was often a subject of state...
Let’s Change Hearts and Minds (and Laws, Too)
Few clichés are so widespread within the evangelical subculture, says Matthew Lee Anderson, as the notion that our witness must be one of “changing hearts and minds.” In careful hands, the idea is at best ambiguous. At worst it reinforces the sort of interior-oriented individualism that allows for and perpetuates a blissful naivete about how institutions and structures shape our dispositions and thoughts. In less than careful hands, the phrase drives a wedge between law and culture by attempting to...
How to Love Liberty More Than a Libertarian Economist
I have a deep and abiding love for liberty—which is why I find myself so often in disagreement with libertarians. Libertarians love liberty too, of course, but they tend to love liberty a bit differently. I love liberty in an earthy, elemental way. I love liberty because I need it—like I need air and food—for human flourishing. In contrast, the libertarians I’ve encountered tend to love liberty primarily as an abstraction. Indeed, the most ideologically consistent libertarians I know seem...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved