Seems like this is a regular feature among American foreign policy elites – the latest entrant, Jim Jones, as reported at Politico:
Nearly 64 years after Harry Truman laid out the case for reconstructing Europe’s economies, in a speech that became known as the Marshall Plan, few diplomatic, economic and foreign policy accomplishments have garnered such residual feelings of goodwill and accomplishment in the United States.
Now, days ahead of President Obama’s major address on the Middle East, former national security adviser Jim Jones, a well-respected voice in foreign policy circles, is suggesting that his vision should include a new Marshall Plan for emerging democracies.
“From my perspective, it may be time to consider a bold idea which would demonstrate our welcome to the new Egypt by considering a type of Marshall Plan for emerging democratic states like Egypt and which young Egyptians are trying to form,” Jones said at the National Press Club on Monday…
This just ignores reality – a common failing among those who wish to expend taxpayer funds in grandiose plans for reform. The Marshall Plan wasn’t a model – it was a one-off thing which cannot be repeated. The reason for this is quite simple: in post-World War Two Europe, the buildings had been blown to pieces but the economic and social skills of the people remained intact.
You see, while we had blasted the German economy in to tiny, little pieces, the German worker was still there – and among the most highly skilled in the world. Furthermore, and almost never noted, is the fact that the Germans retained a great deal of their peace-time productive capacity. The machine tools they had used to make consumer goods pre-war weren’t destroyed in the war – they were carefully stored. Adding a bit of money just allowed the tools to be placed in factories, married to excellent workers and, presto!, economic “miracle”. Additionally, even though the Germans had just emerged from a 12 year Nazi nightmare, they retained the capacity to obey reasonable laws and to conduct business without rampant corruption in business and politics. All of this – the productive potential, the marketable skills, the respect for law – is absent not just in Egypt, but throughout almost the entirety of the Third World. Pouring money in to such places will just be to pour it down a black hole – they and we will get nothing from it.
The problems of the Third World (which still very much includes China; don’t buy idiot stories of their becoming globally dominant) are not intractable, but they are not amenable to rapid solution. It will be a century before they’ll obtain what Thomas Sowell calls the “human capital” to make a free market, democratic society fully functional – and that is only if they start now and work at it. And, initially, we can fully expect them to screw it up time and time again. Our job is to merely encourage those who want to get on the right path and advise those who want to go the wrong way that crossing us will eventually just give the local undertakers a bit of work.
This doesn’t mean money cannot be spent, but it should not be spent with a mind towards ushering in a golden age. If we can just moderate the fanaticism a bit; if we can just give a little leg up to reasonable people; if we can alleviate the most grinding of poverty, we’ll have done all we reasonably can. It is time for people to wake up and realize that the very concept of a government coming in and making a people well is a myth – a falsehood based upon the ultimate liberal falsehood that Man can be made perfect by the actions of men.
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