More On G8's Ill-Advised Charity

Soapgun adds another layer of convincing opinion on a subject I feel strongly about: That more aid to Africa is not the answer; more democratic capitalism is.

The doubled levels of aid may indeed reach some people who, God help them, deperately need it, but it's only fish, not teaching to fish. Even more, the aid is just more candy in the hands of kleptocrats who deserve a revolutionary drubbing, not another treat.

Soapgun quotes extensively from a Cato Institute report by Moeletsi Mbeki; it's a good read, as evidenced by this excerpt:

Future development in Africa requires a new type of democracy -- one that empowers not just the political elite but private-sector producers as well. It is necessary that peasants, who constitute the core of the private sector, become the real owners of their primary asset: land.

Private ownership of land would not only generate wealth but help to check rampant deforestation and accelerating desertification. The so-called communal land tenure system, which is really state ownership of land, ought to be abolished. Moreover, peasants need direct access to world markets. The producers must be able to auction their own cash crops rather than be forced to sell them to state-controlled marketing boards.

The G8 decision to double African aid to $50 billion annually will only serve to delay this kind of fundamental change because it will do nothing to change the nature of Africa's ruling elite.

The leaders of the free, democratic, capitalist world had a chance to do something revolutionary. Instead they listened to Bono. What a shame.

h/t Publius Pundit