Doing Good In A Dump With Oil - The Happy Demise Of Foreign Aid

PETER Bentley was an international development consultant.  In his retirement years he always put quotation marks around ‘development’, for in his many decades in the bush he never saw any such thing.  There could never be such a thing in countries rich in resources but governed by tribal chieftains who had made good and who had to repay those who sacrificed to move them up the ladder of post-colonial chiefdom. 

The end to his years of rational assessment of enabling factors, socio-economic variables, historical consequences, and cultural influences came when he was sent on a mission to an endemically backward, hopelessly corrupt, impossibly unpleasant African country.  

The country had oil, diamonds, and rare earths, and to cover for his sponsor's desire to secure these resources before the Chinese made offers the dictator could not refuse, Bentley was there to do good - a national health project aimed at the poorest of the poor which, according to World Bank estimates, were over 90 percent of the population. 

The Minister of Finance greeted Bentley and his team warmly, hoped they had a pleasant trip and were well settled into the new five-star hotel the President had built for deep-pocketed guests like him. The man was all cheery bonhomie, but Bentley knew him as the country's Rasputin, a savage killer who sat at the right hand of the President and who each year rounded up thousands of political prisoners to spend indefinite years in dark dungeons of rot and filth. 

 

The rare earths were the jewels in the crown - essential elements of modern electronics without which  cell phones and computers would not work, and as such they had become the blood diamonds of international trade.  Countries were willing to give anything and to overlook everything for a chance at these minerals. Rich oil reserves were merely the frosting on the cake. 

And so it was that Bentley entered into an agreement for a health project which would have no benefit whatsoever except for providing the President with window dressing, a pretty display of good works for his people.  He and his government would have to do nothing for the generous grant Bentley would provide.  He would take the money, send it to his various offshore accounts, and let the development workers which came with the money soldier on in the country's Paleolithic villages. 

The mission was Bentley's last hurrah of a career marked by deals such as this one - projects of every presumed social benefit imaginable, all non-starters and empty shells from day one.  Every Mercedes, Land Rover, and Humvee on the rutted, foul streets was a tribute to the President's international savvy, knowhow, and canny ability to snooker the white man. 

The opening dinner hosted by the Minister was a banquet of French wines, lobsters and oysters from Brittany, the finest New Zealand lamb, and tribal delicacies from the Minister's constituency. Musicians played traditional music while beautiful Fulani girls danced to its strains - girls, which Bentley knew, would be gifts to the members of Bentley's team. 

The Minister was an impressive man, a tribal prince whose roots went back to the great Gao Empire of Mali, acquired great wealth through the Saharan slave trade, and became a rich man thanks to his business canniness.  “I repay my debts and carry out my responsibilities in order of priority”, the Minister related, explaining the African system of 'noble largesse'. "I first repay my family, then my tribe, then my region, and finally to my country”. 

It was a lesson that Bentley had learned in every country of Africa, a hard lesson for those who still, despite millennia of history, let alone the recent chaotic years of Big Men, civil wars, and tribal conflict, believed in rational progress and responsibility.  

No one but the African autocrats seemed to get it.  We are dumps with oil, shitholes of corruption, violence, pathetic ignorance, and venality, the Minister said in so many words, but as long as there are cobalt, rare earths, diamonds, emeralds, gas and oil in the ground,  we will continue to be.

The Minister was proud of his twenty-five room mansion overlooking the Atlantic, his Bentley, Maserati, two classic Mercedes, and his TR-4 reconstructed runabout. 

The Minister spoke perfect English, but spoke French to Bentley and his mission for fun.  If his Saturday evening was to be spoiled and his assignation with his youngest and most beautiful wife delayed, why not perform?  His linguistic virtuosity, seamlessly woven historical and cultural references, his allusions to Greece and Ghana were all part of his vaudeville act. 

The dinner, too, was part of the side show – elegant china, Baccarat crystal, foie gras, filet de sole, fines de claires, all served impeccably by white-liveried, practiced servants. 

The Minister was a man among men who had used his intelligence, tribal heritage, and will to rise to power, wealth, and influence.  Because in such a corrupt administration in such a corrupt country no high official was occupied with anything official, and that leadership was more a matter of show than substance, the Minister had time on his hands; so other than a few hours delay before bedtime with his Fulani green-eyed mistress, the evening was enjoyable.  

The corruption, venality, and greed of African dictators is endemic to the continent.  From east to west, north to south, Africa is a sinkhole of poverty, misrule, and shameless financial ambition. 

East African presidents and presidential pretenders have been called before international tribunals for crimes against humanity. New countries like South Sudan, entities that never should have been created but for the racial idealism of America, are failed states.  South Africa since the end of apartheid and the transitional rule of Nelson Mandela, has become a crime-ridden, politically unstable, corrupt place.

The Big Men stay in power because of three things: 1) they are canny manipulators of Western intentions; 2) they are considered by many to be the representatives of the noble African, a native of tribal roots with profound respect for the forest and the environment, and heir to society's favor; and 3) thanks to the hundreds of millions of look-the-other-way international grants, they can pay off the police, the military, and the secret police and assure longevity and political protection. 

Bentley was looking forward to retirement and a graceful exit from a profession which had done absolutely nothing for the 'beneficiaries' intended - the poor, the marginalized, and the desperate - and served only to enrich the powerful.  If it hadn't been for his own Fulani lovers, the foie gras, and five-star luxury afforded him, he would have quit long ago; but in accepting the perks of the trade, he felt unashamedly akin to the leaders who neutered his development interests.  Life was indeed a measure of self-interest embedded in a marvelously produced melodrama.

 

In his earlier days he justified his engagement with Africa by doing his best.  Even though the projects had been designed with only political interests in mind, and even though project funds were reduced to a trickle thanks to unofficial siphoning, if he tried, tried really hard, some incidental, peripheral advantage to the poor might result. 

It didn't take long for that fantasy to vanish, and a deliberate procedural approach to replace it.  Even in an operatic melodrama there is at least a tinselly glitter of life.  'Don't get too philosophical on me', he said to himself over coquilles de poisson and a fine Sancerre. 

The Donald Trump Years - Pure Musical Comedy, A Truly American Idiom

Musical comedy is a very American idiom with its roots in vaudeville. The form was born on Broadway in a series of shows produced between 1878 and 1884 and featured characters and situations from New York's lower classes.  The term 'musical comedy' was first used to describe American shows in 1893.  The popularity of shows like 'Evangeline' and 'The Brook' led to a new fashion in New York theatre, and musical comedy was born. 

The producers of Broadway and Hollywood have been geniuses at creating myth - wonderful fanciful stories of adventure, love, romance all with happy endings, all perfectly tailored to provide a happy sanctuary away from the humdrum,  Hobbesian 'solitary, brute, nasty, and short' life outside.

The great musical comedy epics of the Golden era - Oklahoma! and South Pacific - left no doubt as to the iconic Americanism of the genre.  The productions were big, outsized versions of an America that never existed but could, exceptional stories of heroic adventure, ambition, family and community.  Later shows like West Side Story reflected the zeitgeist of modern America, but never retreated from the genre's basic principle - love conquers all and America is a great country. 

The musical comedy's fundamental civility helped preserve the ethos of the Fifties - a patriotic, post-war optimism and belief in family, community, and faith.  Ordinary lives became those of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, My Fair Lady, High Society, and Hello Dolly. The men wore tuxes and the ladies long dresses.  They spoke well, behaved mischievously, and all ended happily together. 

What more suitable musical comedy for the Trump years than 'Oklahoma', a show that tells the story of love and rivalry in the early 1900s, Oklahoma territory, focusing on the relationships between a farm girl and a sinister farmhand. 

The musical follows the lives and loves of farmers and cowboys as they navigate love and rivalry, all set in the context of coming statehood. The story is about jealousy, love, and the struggle for acceptance in a changing society. 

 

There is nothing shopworn or commonplace about Donald Trump.  A man of glitz and glamour, tinsel and sequins, arm candy, yachts, and mansions; a man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and New York.  This is a man who not only embodies America but is America.  He is our ambition, our bourgeois taste, our commonfolk sensibility, and above all our love for image, show, and the impossible dream.   

Hollywood is not just a reflection of Americans' desire for what never can be, but the very heart and soul of the dream that it can be.  It is also the venue for righteousness and hard-won honor.  America is the land of Gunfight at the OK Corral were good triumphs over evil - not in the resolution of great armed conflict, but at 100 paces, man to man, an individual struggle for what is good and right. 

Trump's press conferences remarks are pure Borscht Belt - he is Jackie Mason, Shecky Green, and Rodney Dangerfield all rolled into one.  His remaking of Washington - striking the set of bureaucratic government, building the most grandiose, baroque, flouncy ballroom only imagined in a 40s Hollywood period piece - his courting of movie stars, wrestlers, and football players; his going from one public arena to another, all with marching bands, fireworks, and flyovers are things to behold.  

This is America, Iowans and Kentuckians say.  Donald Trump is the first real American president, one who is either like the people or what they want to be.  He is as exaggerated, oversized, self-assured, and armed with an insouciance and indifference to criticism no different from the great shoot-'em-up heroes of Westerns, riding into town, tall in the saddle, six-gun on his hip, dusty from the long ride across the prairie, but here to set things straight. 

He is neither a patrician JFK, all Harvard, Boston, Pablo Casals and Robert Frost - Camelot as Edwardian romance - nor a simple man like Harry Truman showing his mettle at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nor LBJ, all cowboy but without the white hat and the romance.  He didn't ride at the head of the herd fighting Indians who had surrounded his men, whooping and hollering and killing, but dragged America into a needless, bloody, endless war in Vietnam. 

No, Trump is America - he is loud, showy, full of beans, and ready to burst into song, just like Rosanno Brazzi on the Broadway stage. He is our president, not Europe's or Asia's.  Donald Trump could be on no other world stage than this one. 

Which is why the Left hates him so.  It is not just his politics - his radical conservatism and promise to undo each and every progressive, cant-filled, absurd and venal policies - nor his unrestrained use of executive authority, nor his challenges of the courts - it is who he is.  Progressives cannot stand such a man, such a showman, a tummler, a clown.  

Worst of all, they cannot stand that he is a lowbrow rube, a man remaking America in an unconscionable image.  If he has his way, the country will be a blonde, blue-eyed, white jamboree. The Bible will be back, women will be homemakers, men will be men. 

Of course it will, and who ever had any doubts?  The country, even after one year of the Trump presidency, has already turned its back on the hysteria of the Biden era.  The circus freak show, the hall of mirrors, the bearded ladies and two-headed babies, are gone, dismissed, ignored as though they never existed. 

Looking at the past few years of progressive 'reform', they don't seem real.  The black man was never meant to be put on any pedestal let alone atop the human pyramid. The gender spectrum is nothing but the dream of gay men in peacock feathers and sequins on Mardi Gras floats. Illegal aliens are not asylees, refugees, and needy newcomers.  There is no such thing as a free lunch, giveaways are entitlements, socialism is other people's money. 

Enjoy three more years of the Greatest Show on Earth - enjoy the fanfare, the trapeze acts, the operatic solos, the best musical comedy to be played in Washington since 'Stars and Stripes' in 1852. 

Progressives may be crying in their beer, but most Americans are throwing their hats in the air, cheering for an encore. 

Affordable Housing? - Fine, Help Me Afford St Tropez

I have my eye on a villa in St. Tropez.  Priced at $4.5 million it has everything – private marina, manicured grounds, spectacular view of the Mediterranean, palatial ball room, formal gardens, and easy access to the bistros, brasseries, and dining rooms of the town.  It is a bit above my price range, but I have heard that there are public subsidies that can enable people who cannot ordinarily afford to live in a place to move there; and legislation guaranteeing them rights to stay in perpetuam.  

The origin of this chimera has its origins in progressive political history and its skewed vision of land and tenants rights.  There was something noble about the fireman, policeman, or school teacher, and something distinctly un-American about displacing them from their old neighborhoods, their friends and family, and place of work.  Communities which took decades to assemble, create their own unique and very special ethos, and had cultural significance should never be disassembled, taken over by monied interests for profit and speculation.   These ethnic communities were anointed by the earliest anti-capitalist social reformers who promoted ‘integrity, union, and culture’.  Little Italy was not simply a stopping off point for European immigrants of the late 19th century, a step on the way to Queens and Long Island; but an intrinsically valuable place in which years of brotherhood, neighborhood, and family had been invested.  To break these prized enclaves would be tantamount to ethnic cleansing. 

Of course this is all fairy tale fantasy.  For as long as the Republic has stood, city-dwellers moved to neighborhoods they could afford.  When reformist, real estate-minded mayors transformed New York to the virtually unlivable city it was in the 70s to a metropolitan star, desirable real estate prices went up.  Those living in areas to be redeveloped and repurposed to upscale residential towers, simply moved.  There was nothing sacred about their bit of land or tenement apartment; nothing absolute in their grounding there; nothing of principle nor of permanent value.  

The same is true for rent control.  Cities like San Francisco and New York have acted on the same fanciful principal.  The city – i.e. the taxpayer – should subsidize those tenants in privileged buildings.  Regardless of market value, a way should be found for them to stay; and the same discredited reasons were given – a viable, culturally rich, highly invested community should not be disassembled; firemen and teachers should live near where the work, etc.  Commuting is a way of life for all metropolitan areas.  People move out and away from high priced center city neighborhoods when they become unaffordable, but when they do are the anchors for new, equally viable communities.  Wealthy commuters are quite happy on the North Shore, Morris County, or Greenwich and willing to invest a few hours on the train for pleasant living – not the grand, luxurious apartments of Park and Fifth Avenues, but sumptuous enough. 

Rent control, rent stabilization, and affordable housing are simply politically-driven programs with no basis in history or economic reality.  The mobility of the American population has long been its strong point, its engine of prosperity, and its distance from the change-averse Europeans. 

The DC government, like many others, has passed laws to ‘encourage’ developers to provide a certain number of ‘affordable’ housing units in any new high-rise building they construct.  The arguments for such ‘affordability’ are many.  It is important for firemen, police, and teachers, advocates say, to live near their work.  They are the backbone of middle class society, perhaps its most important members because of the charge they carry, the responsibility of safeguarding our communities, teaching our children, and saving our homes, and they need public assistance.  Theirs is a higher good, say proponents of affordable housing laws, rent control, and rent stabilization.

‘Diversity’ is perhaps the most relevant principle underlying public support of housing.  There is something inherently good about a mix of cultures, ethnicities, race, and incomes.  A city will be a better, more tolerant, and more civil place if such social mixing occurs.  It is only right and proper for government to accelerate the trend and to engineer a more welcoming and accepting society.

Neither policy stands up to scrutiny.  There is no reason why public servants cannot live where they can afford and commute to work like employees in the private sector.  Young workers in Washington routinely live in the suburbs, in small, shared apartments in Rockville and Gaithersburg, and accept the opportunity cost and Metro fare as a worthwhile expense given the attractive salaries paid downtown.  Firemen can also live out of town, come in for their shifts, and be as ready as any colleague who lives near the station to fight fires.  The same goes for police and educators.  A teacher in a Northwest DC school who lives in Falls Church performs no less well than one who lives within city limits.

Proponents of affordable housing say that public laws and subsidies enabling these public servants to live close to work has an ancillary public good – fewer commuters, less pollution, and less congestion.  Yet the number of public workers in one of the nation’s booming high-tech regions is infinitesimal compared to the number of private employees.   Washington’s congestion is due to the economic boom which has brought it out of the one-horse, one-employer, government town, to the place to live. 

If one were for a moment to consider affordable housing proponents’ argument, how might government assure fair and equitable distribution of public resources?  It might be all well and good for the City Council to vote in favor of its firemen, teachers, and police; but no law could be that exclusive.  Anyone falling under an income threshold  would and should be eligible for such housing.  Such a law is a boon to young private sector workers happy to be able to live in high-rent, exclusive neighborhoods of the city paying low rent.  Why should government support them?

As importantly, what would be the threshold?  One cannot fix rent limits without considering income; and how indeed could that be determined? Prevailing firemen’s salaries? And how to fix the rent?  One could match base (fireman’s) income with rents paid, and fix ‘affordable’ rates accordingly. However, this would tend to keep rents lower than they should be given ‘aspirational valuation’.  Families with modest income may be willing to pay a higher proportion of their disposable income for housing in a desirable neighborhood, and any rent below this aspirational level would be uneconomic.

There are two forms of government support for affordable housing.  The first is by law which requires developers of new buildings to reserve a certain percentage of units for lower-income families.  The second is to enforce rent control, a program whereby landlords can only raise rents minimally and gradually for existing tenants. 

The argument for the first option is that taxpayers pay nothing for the program.  Landlords simply will charge more rent for their market-based units in order to cross-subsidize the low-rent ones.  This however will result in two undesirable  consequences.  First, the higher rents will discourage those families of modest means who, as above, assess a high aspirational value to apartments in desirable neighborhoods.  In other words, the market could, left alone, serve the same purpose as government mandates.  Perhaps bottom-rung middle class renters would be excluded, but why should government make that choice or distinction?

Second is that developers under an affordable housing mandate will build units inferior to those at market rates.  They will be smaller, lower, with less light and access while the higher-than-market rents will assure luxury accommodations for those renters on higher floors.  The buildings will be de facto segregated.  Such physical segregation will ensure normal, predictable social segregation.  The young lawyers and lobbyists on the higher floors will be even more unlikely to mix with the police and fire fighters on the lower.

Rent control is an even worse option, for, as in the case of San Francisco and other cities with strict rent control laws, landlords simply hold properties off the market, benefitting from increases in land values while avoiding the losses incurred because of insufficient rents. Not only that, the city benefits from high rent districts.  Former NYC Mayor Bloomberg understood that the development of the High Line, a rails-to-trails pedestrian walkway through lower Midtown Manhattan, would generate economic development nearby.  He was right, and the property taxes from the new desirable high-rent buildings have helped fill the city’s coffers and permitted it to invest in better infrastructure, parks, and public services.  Lower income residents and small business owners were indeed displaced, but such displacement is part of a dynamic economy.

Finally, ‘diversity’.  Despite the clamor and the insistence on its higher good, there is no evidence that it in fact contribute to civil harmony, tolerance, and good governance.  In fact, as this era of identity politics has amply shown, diversity has contributed to divisiveness and disunion. Engineered diversity – like any other public distortion of the economic or social marketplace – is more likely to set back social, racial, and ethnic integration than to encourage it.

Likes have always attracted likes.  Well-paid, well-educated professionals want to interact with people like them – not policemen, firefighters, and utility workers.  They want their children to grow up and be educated in a homogeneous environment and do not want them to be held back by students from less-motivated if not dysfunctional families.  For all the public expressions of support for diversity, ambitious families want none of it.  This conviction has nothing to do with, as many critics claim, racism – the desire to keep schools white.  It has only to do with keeping them upper middle class, high-performing, and socially homogeneous. One of the greatest advantages of Washington’s private schools is that students will be in a uniform community of highly intelligent, motivated, interested, and intellectually curious classmates.

In other words, given fundamental social behavior, the market works quite well.  Despite insistence that social engineering works, human nature will always trump interventionism.  ‘Affordable’ housing is but one example of ill-considered social engineering and perhaps the most visible and obvious.  Yet such engineering occurs throughout the public system.  Schools have become experimental laboratories for social reformation.  Academic excellence is no longer the unique guiding principle of elementary education. Teachers are now responsible for ensuring tolerance of ‘difference’, promoting ‘multiple intelligences’ at the expense of high-performance, socially practical disciplined cognitive learning, and readjusting gender behavioral patterns – e.g. discouraging typical male behavior in favor of a more collaborative, cooperative female environment) .

It is no surprise that parents who can afford it, quickly move their children to private, parochial, or charter schools.  Not only are they in search of a higher quality education; they are fed up with prescriptive administrative policies and government interference.

Affordable housing, like all other public social engineering programs will wither and die, removed without notice by economic dynamism.  It will be revived in down times – the New Deal was never finished and buried – but in good times or even modest ones, it will remain marginal and insignificant.