Trodding them underfoot

The managers of an online bookstore I have patronized in the past sent me an email announcing that they are going on a march to end world hunger. They've invited me to contribute to the cause. I was struck by how folks who are surrounded by books on history and economics can still come to the conclusion that people are starving in the Third World because nobody has thought to mail them a box of beef jerky.

It's a coincidence of factors, I suppose: inadequate economics understanding, a bumper-sticker mentality, an overindulged democratic sense that leads perfectly rational Westerners to think that the world can be made better by their collectively saying: "Boo, bad things." I'm inclined to blame John Lennon's insipid song.

The reality is that people are hungry because they live under governments that undermine entrepreneurial initiative at every turn, that confiscate property, that wage war internally and externally, that are composed of inveterate thugs. March all you want against hunger, ship as many crates of cereal as you like, it won't be enough.

It doesn't help that our foreign aid often serves to prop up the very regimes that are the problem. Or that U.S. agribusiness has such a chokehold on our politics that we restrict food imports from Third World farmers, while at the same time depressing their home markets by dumping our surplus food on them. Not to mention the other business opportunities we deny the poor by highly taxing imports of their clothing and other goods. The data are clear that international trade tends to help the impoverished, yet politicians and their supporters on both sides in this country are indifferent to that fact. They care about votes, and making sure that our producers are protected from competition.

Which has worked wonders for the U.S. auto companies, hasn't it?

So as I think about how the deluge of campaign mail is about to begin in earnest from both parties, I can only think: a pox on both your houses. Politicians from each party pay lip service to helping the international poor, and compete to see who will allocate more pennies to the losing cause of funding them out of poverty, but the reality is that all we who have cheered import restrictions, or short-sighted realpolitik aid to the thugocracies which from time to time we convince ourselves are in our best interest to support, have contributed to this problem we call Global Hunger.

And the truth is that we are too selfish to fix it. So let's just march instead.