COMMENT ⊗   VALID 00002 PAGES
C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00002 00002	U.S. RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRIES
C00007 ENDMK
C⊗;
U.S. RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRIES


	The point this article attempts to make is that the U.S. has
no responsibility for the  underdeveloped countries and cannot take
such responsibility even if it wanted to.  Instead, the responsibility
belongs to the people and governments of these countries and any
attempt to pretend otherwise only harms them.  The reasons are the
following:

	1. The aid the U.S. can give to any country under the present
situation of widely distributed aid is small compared to the amount
of investment required to maintain the standard of living of the
at the present level of the increasing populations, let alone improve it.

	2. In all these countries, there exists a mechanism that can
soak up aid at a rate greater than any likely supply without  generating
an improvement.  This mechanism is the expansion of the governmental
bureaucracy.  In many underdeveloped countries, getting a place in the
bureaucracy is the main hope of most educated persons.  Getting a place
as a businessman or as an engineer is much less popular.

	3. In a country with a strong extended family system, the problem
is particularly acute, because anyone with an ounce of decent family
loyalty will make every effort to add his relatives to the bureaucracy.

	4. Therefore, the key to development is to overcome this.  It can
be done in the following ways:

		a. Communism sometimes maintains a rather tight ship, and
because it usually destroys the old ruling class, its own corrupt tendencies
develop slowly.  Its weak sense of economics, however, produces other
disadvantages.

		b. A tight oligarchy can keep outsiders out.

		c. A determined government might possibly resist expansion.
A system with many parties and deadlocked politics is probably not good at
it, because government jobs can be used to pay off political debts.

		d. If the ruling class is in business rather than in
government, competition often eliminates bloated firms and dictates the
hiring of non relatives in order to get competent people so the firm
will survive.

	5. American aid generally worsens the situation,
perhaps because appeasing anti-U.S. sentiment requires providing more
opportunities in government service or because foreign aid provides a
resource that can be used to prop up uncompetitive enterprises.

	Therefore, the following policies might be recommended:

	1. The idea that the U.S. must aid some specific country is to be
rejected.

	2. Perhaps major aid should be concentrated in a few or even one country
at a time.  Then proposals of how aid would be used might be solicited, and the
aid given to the country whose plan looked most promising.  The measures
to prevent bureaucratic growth and other inefficiencies proposed in the
plan would be especially important.

	3. This might not apply to some kinds of technological aid that had
a very high leverage such as in the technology of birth control and public
health.