From: Randall Parker 

In , the sagacious richhong{at}hawksci.com
Richard Hong perspicated:
> Have you heard of an entirely impractical quest called Jubilee 2000?  It is
> a movement by most major denominations to get the first world countries to
> CANCEL Third World debt (www.j2000usa.org).  In most countries of Africa, as
> an example, the govt spends many times more money repaying debt than on
> health care and education.

Forgiving debt when the debt actually is retarding economic growth makes sense.

But there was no way that the ex-SU could absorb meaningful aid as long as
it was controlled by the same apparatchiks who ran it into the ground in
the first place.

> And the debt ballooned not because of how much
> they borrowed initially, but mostly because when interest rates skyrocketed
> in the 80s they couldn't keep up and refinanced.  So because they are paying
> interest on interest, children die.  It's just wrong.  The entire
> sub-saharan African debt to the first world is a mere $227 billion.  The
> U.S. used to rack that up as a one-year deficit.

The World Bank and IMF never should have gone around loaning money to these
places in the first place. They corrupted the elites in these countries and
supported centralized control and big trophy projects wholly out of touch
with the needs of 3rd world economies.

The Marshall Plan was, at best, an exception to the rule of what normally
happens with aid to poor countries. So, if the Marshall Plan really did
work as well as was claimed (hard to tell since we have to rely on
histories written by liberals) why is it an exception? Because Europe
already had the institutions and culture that made industrialization
possible in the first place.

You think the same amount of money spent at the same time in South America
or Africa would have had beneficial effects so dramatic? No way.

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