L'Etat, c'est la grande fiction à travers laquelle tout le monde s'efforce de vivre aux dépens de tout le monde. Frédéric Bastiat

lundi 26 décembre 2005

AIDES PRIVEES

Les aides privées sont plus efficaces que la charité publique, comme le rappelle un article du Wall Street Journal qui se penche sur l'exemple américain:

What impels Americans to engage in such kindness to strangers? We suspect that Americans give to private charities because they recognize that these initiatives work best. Bobby Jindal, a Congressman from New Orleans whose own home was badly damaged by flood waters, tells us that "by far the most effective relief efforts have come from private charitable aid organizations. FEMA and other state/local government agencies set up bureaucracies and red tape, while private businesses and charities moved in swiftly to alleviate the human suffering on the ground."

(...) when it comes to funding self-serving bureaucracies that don't produce results--such as much of the U.N. and most other multi-government foreign-aid schemes--Americans are skeptics. For good reason. Study after study has documented that there is no correlation between the amount of foreign assistance a nation receives and its subsequent rate of economic development. Think Africa, which has received hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to little positive effect. This suggests that the optimal amount of U.S. government development aid may be zero.