Rex in the City

Its nothing but good news today, as Greg Sheridan gleefully points out in Rupert's Organ Of Freedom that that helping the poor doesn’t actually help them at all.

All that talk of giving aid to poor countries, that left-wing guilt machine, that forces you to put your hand in your pocket to donate when somebody knocks on your door and tells you about the heartbreak in Togo, is now bankrupt ideology.

The Headline sums it up: Aid is not the answer to poverty

Read the first paragraph of the article

WE'RE rich because they're poor. No proposition is more central to the left-wing view of the world than the idea that the rich West survives in its comfort because it exploits the poor in the Third World.

and savour the text all the way down to the fifth paragraph

The president of the Asia Development Bank, Haruhiko Kuroda, who is visiting Australia, told me yesterday that a large aid inflow can cause currency appreciation which renders a developing economy uncompetitive and therefore retards economic growth. And the only way poverty ever declines is through economic growth.

Now you’ll need to skip pretty much the rest of the article and go on down to the last paragraph:

Overcoming poverty is up to poor countries themselves, an idea unwelcome to ideologues, theorists and most academics (except that tiny number still left in country studies) everywhere.

And there you have it. Proof, if you ever needed it that the Left’s outdated ideologies, and the freedom hating machinery of the compassion industry, are actually making poor countries poorer.

So next time you’re asked to donate to some apparently worthy cause, remind them that they’re not helping, they’re hurting, and try to talk them out of this folly before they can do any more harm. And after you’ve slammed the door in their face, spare a thought for those poor people in Togo, who can now climb that ladder of prosperity without the condescending stickybeaking of the latte left interrupting their experience of competition and freedom.

As they say, it’s the thought that counts, and the people of Togo will be grateful that you’ve even thought about them at all.