Before asking the G8 Summit to cure poverty, remember Davy Crockett's sage advice

Global warming is another matter...

But with the Live 8 concerts, an HBO film, and the anti-globalization-and-poverty publicity machine on overdrive, the past month has seen an accelerating popular sentiment to task governments of the industrial world "take a bite out of poverty," primarily in Africa.

The Group of Eight (G8) governments—US, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia—are meeting for their annual summit near Edinburgh, Scotland, July 6-8.  They'll be accompanied by a full slew of protesters, possibly in the hundreds of thousands, mostly peaceful, but surely with another smaller set of those same crazed nihilist whackos who crash all the G8s just for theft and thuggery.

Note  -  These guys are the distilled essence of what remains of the violent existentialist terrorists that have persisted on the outskirts of modern Western civilization: from the commie Red Brigade or the IRA to the neo-Nazi punkrock skinheads who overdosed on early Mel Gibson movies. These people are very scary Ted Kaczynski wannabe joiner types, the reductio ad absurdum of the "Bad" Left

Let's speak for the moment to the anti-poverty activists who compose the "Neutral" Left.  (We can't call them fully Good, because they haven't reached libertarian status, but neutral leftists genuinely care about real people and distrust most political power.)  I'd like to spell out to them why appealing to governments to solve poverty is mistaken.

To that end, I offer Davy Crockett.  The story of US Representative Davy Crockett's refusal to vote for government aid is standard libertarian fare.  It's everywhere on the WWW, but check out Foundation for Economic Education (FEE).

In one of Crockett's earlier terms as a US Representative—he was elected to Congress three times, 1827-29, 1829-31, and 1833-35—a fire occurred in nearby Georgetown one night, destroying several homes and leaving many people, including women and children, with only the clothes on their backs.  Largely at Crockett's instigation, the next day the House put aside all other business and appropriated $20,000 for the relief of these citizens.

Months later, Davy was traveling around his district for reelection and ran into a poor, simple farmer named Horatio Bunce.  Crockett asked for his vote.  Bunce responded he could not in good conscience support Crockett because of Crockett's authorization of the $20,000 in government relief money.

That appropriation, said Bunce, was wrong by: "giving what was not yours to give. The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things.  To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else.  Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution."[emphasis added]

Crockett considered Bunce's well-framed argument, and became convinced then and there.  He swore he would never so violate the Constitution again.

After Crockett is reelected, a House bill is proposed to aid the widow of a distinguished naval officer.  Several beautiful speeches are made to endorse the motion.  Just as the vote is about to be taken, Crockett rises:

So Crockett was true to his word, and opposed giving away other people's money.  Both on principle and on Constitutional grounds.  This admirable quality of a genuine American hero sheds much light on the current world frenzy toward "curing poverty" by government intervention.

Live 8 and the G8 "Long Walk to Justice" anti-African-poverty hucksters don't conceive of charity as voluntary giving.  Indeed, Bob Geldof, organizer of these phantasmagoric events announced that the Live 8 concerts, "were intended not to raise money, but instead to raise awareness."  Which is unfortunate because his 1985 Live Aid concerts raised $200 million in voluntary giving of money.

Apparently, this time the so-called anti-poverty leadership is going after money raised involuntarily from the taxpayers of the so-called rich nations.  Again, this is a serious violation of the Constitution and the Davy Crockett Principle, i.e., "It is not yours to give."  To be fair, many of the obstacles faced by poorer people in poorer countries are in the nature of trade restrictions imposed by governments of richer countries.

The anti-poverty folks are opposed to these restrictions, as are we.

Also, in addition to massive amounts of direct foreign aid, a big part of proposed anti-poverty measures is forgiveness of aid-recipient debt.  Most of that is probably okay, too (Most loans are derived from stolen taxpayer funds, and failing to pay back a thief isn't really stealing).

But to understand the correct approach to helping people in poorer countries, let's sketch how the foreign aid system works today.  It is almost entirely a government system.

A quick look at this diagram reveals a central problem.  The people of the aid-recipient nations are suffering mainly from the domination and expropriation of wealth (Z) by their own governments—or whatever mob happens to be in charge.  The richer nations then add tariffs and restrictions on stuff the people would like to produce, effectively taking another chunk of life (Z₂) from them.

What our Live 8 and G8 poverty contingent want to do is increase the amount of money from the donor-nation government-corporation-bank cluster and transfer it to the recipient-nation government-corporation-bank cluster (Y).  In order to do that, the amount of money taken from citizens in the donor nations (X) will need to be increased, as well.

It should be pointed out that the corporate/financial insiders in the donor nations and in the recipient nations tend to overlap in meaningful ways... like by often being the same wonderful group of guys.  So don't you wonder whether much of that generous forced-giving from the citizens of the donor nation is actually reaching some poor dirt farmer in Zimbabwe whose family has died of AIDS?

The prescription to the poverty of all these poor people is obvious.  Get rid of the government-corporation-bank cluster overhead.  Figure 2 shows the rational-libertarian solution to world poverty.

G8 can go a long way toward eliminating poverty by eliminating the expensive government-business clusters.  Let people help one another directly—with aid and with knowledge.  Americans, by the way, are naturally quite good at that, with all their voluntary charity orgs.(1)

So, Mr. Geldof and neutral leftists, check it out.  Heal our world by spreading the nonaggression principle(2) instead of turning a blind eye toward government aggression and the worldwide poverty it causes.

Note  -  The result of the meeting was a more aggressive foreign aid package along the model of Figure 1.  Debt from the poorest nations was forgiven.  The US basically did nothing toward reducing anthropogenic (human-generated) carbon in the atmosphere.  In other words, same old stuff.  No moves toward a free international economy, nor toward any technologies that supplant fossil fuel-based systems.