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\chapter{32}{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 could not 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:

\item{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.

\item{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.

\item{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.

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

\itemitem{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.

\itemitem{b.}A tight oligarchy can keep outsiders out.

\itemitem{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.

\itemitem{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.

\item{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.

\noindent Therefore, the following policies might be recommended:

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

\item{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.

\item{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.
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