🚀 go-pugleaf

On 21 Oct 2004 14:19:13 -0700, dtaylor@3rivers.net (DTaylor) wrote:

>Due to the high volume
>of clothing donated to African countries, the clothing industry in
>most of Africa has been virtually wiped out, destroyed, bankrupt.  The
>people that were to be helped by the aid now have fewer jobs and a
>reduced chance for any economic recovery.

This argument reminds me of Bastiat's economic sophisms.

The donated clothing case is a simple case of comparative advantage:
it is cheaper to harvest used clothing from donors in rich countries
than to make new clothing in poor ones, and the used clothing is
typically of better quality.  Your argument that cheap clothing
imports reduce economic opportunity (another word for scarcity,
remember) in poor countries is therefore logically equivalent to any
number of exploded arguments against free trade.

>By the way, the clothing donated by people is auctioned off to various
>levels of distribution for sale to the end user.  So much for charity.

??  It's not like worse things don't happen when money is given...

> Somehow, these starving people manage to find the money to buy
>designer cast-offs.

They aren't starving when they buy the cast-offs.

>40 years of hand-outs to third world countries has produced starvation
>and poverty on a scale unheard of prior to the beginning of the
>hand-outs. Way to go.

True, aid has kept many millions of people alive who would otherwise
have died, but without solving their underlying problem: bad
government.  As a result, the problem is indeed bigger in an absolute
sense.  But that's like saying that antibiotics increase the rate of
heart disease, by keeping people alive until they are old enough to
get heart disease.

Perhaps in addition to the 40 years of hand-outs, you could have given
some thought to the 40 years of lending by First-World banks to
blood-soaked Third-World dictators who then deposited the money right
back into those same banks (but in their own numbered accounts), and
the borderline Satanic practice of holding the poor victims of those
dictators responsible for such loans, and making them pay interest on
them that dwarfs the hand-outs they get.

Naahhhh.  That would require some honesty and intelligence.

-- Roy L