Comment by grandempire
8 days ago
I see your point about it being a way to disperse carrots for political leverage. But it also looks a a lot like a Cold War version of teaching Afghans about the American constitution.
But the projects that are being funded today don’t resemble the ones in the 60s-80s. And thats not to suggest it previously was unbiased and now is politicized, but the parties and their values have changed. So that old bureaucratic organization has a new mission
Giving out crops promoted the idea that market capitalism brought prosperity. That isn’t enough for liberalism which has moved up Maslows hierarchy to meaning and purpose. Physical aid is merely a means for bringing the true goods - social justice, equity, inclusion, education, etc.
That’s a good point and I don’t know how “The purpose of a system is what it does“ reacts to change in a system.
Or what to call the side-effects of a system going away.
One of the statistics I read was that the average American judges foreign aid at 31% of the Federal budget instead of the true 1%. In one way, that’s remarkable efficiency: 31x perception. In another way, it gives bad actors in the government an advantage: by cutting a measly 1%, you can rely on uninformed Americans to give you credit for 31x cuts.