How Not to Help Africa, Haiti, et al

I was still a student at Macalester when I met an economics student from Kenya who made a very compelling case for the US to help Africa by rapidly scaling back the "help" it was offering to Africa. The concept is well explained in the aptly-named "Haiti Doesn't Need Your T-Shirt" article.

It kills me when I hear Americans say that the first US government programs that should be cut are foreign aid (the budget for which they almost over estimate by many orders of magnitude). The reality is that the US foreign assistance budget primarily exists to benefit Americans. American banks, farmers, arms manufacturers, etc. We take stuff we cannot use but still want to produce (often because of the strong lobbying arm of a related interest group) and ship it off to other countries, often at the expense of destroying their economies.

Want to be a farmer in Africa or manufacture clothes? Good luck! You'll be competing against shitty free stuff from the U.S. And it is very hard to compete with free.