The Aid Virus

DanHan:

Socialists....emphasise motive over outcome.... the key thing, for Lefties, is to show that you're a caring person.

I've just been talking to a very clever man. He's called Thompson Ayodele, he's from Nigeria and he thinks that overseas aid is making African countries poorer.

Foreign aid, he suggests, isn't useless; it's actively harmful. It discourages enterprise, fosters dependency and bolsters corrupt regimes.

As Thompson puts it: "The British Treasury is empty. So you are going to be borrowing money in order to give it away. And the countries that get it will be poorer as a result". Yup: but at least we'll have shown everyone how nice we are.

I'd quibble with this last; the government isn't "borrowing other people's money", it's stealing it from other people's children and their own at the point of a gun, the gun to be paid for by those children. And The Aid Virus doesn't just corrupt Africa, it corrupts the mass of Obama voters in America: government workers, aid recipients, professional victims and elites.