Abolish USAID (and End All Foreign Aid)
UPCOMING EVENT: Next week, Wednesday, February 5, at noon. FFF is hosting a get-together in downtown Boston after the oral arguments in Ian Freeman’s appeal, where we will discuss the oral arguments. I will be there. Trillium Brewing Fort Point, 50 Thomson Pl, Boston, MA 02210; (857) 449-0083; https://trilliumbrewing.com. Reminder: The Court of Appeals is located in the John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse, One Courthouse Way in Boston. The oral arguments are scheduled for 9:30 a.m. on the 7th floor of the courthouse. Trillium Brewing is about one block away. See here for more details.
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President Trump and Elon Musk have stirred up a hornet’s nest among statists and CIA assets in the mainstream press with their threat to abolish USAID, which Trump said is “run by a bunch of radical lunatics.”
The statists and the CIA assets in the press are firing back with everything they have. For example, they are detailing all the poor people that USAID helps around the world with the U.S. taxpayer-funded foreign aid that USAID distributes. The point is to paint Trump and Musk as heartless people who hate the poor, needy, and disadvantaged. It’s a time-honored way to diffuse criticism of any welfare program, not just those funded by USAID. Just accuse the opponent of a welfare program of hating the poor and then trot out some starving children. Opposition to the program is supposed to wilt away.
It’s important to keep something important in mind though. Country to popular opinion, there is no care or compassion involved in this program or any other foreign-aid program or, for that matter, in any welfare-state program. That’s because USAID foreign aid is funded through the coercive apparatus of taxation and the harsh enforcement measures of the IRS, one of the most powerful agencies in U.S. history. When it comes to paying income taxes, people don’t have a real choice. If you don’t pay, you go to jail. Don’t forget that they forced income-tax opponent Irwin Schiff to die in prison rather than giving him a compassionate release so that he could die with his family around him.
There is no way to reconcile coercion with genuine care and compassion. The latter comes from the willing heart of the individual, not the coercive apparatus of the IRS and political decisions of USAID bureaucrats.
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Thus, contrary to what the statists and the CIA’s assets in the mainstream press maintain, USAID “aid to the poor” does not mean that America is a benevolent country or that American taxpayers are good and caring people. It simply means that the IRS collects taxes on people’s income and USAID bureaucrats distrib
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