WASHINGTON — Working to salvage an aid package to Ukraine, Republican senators pitched an idea to former President Donald Trump that they thought he’d like: Instead of a grant, the U.S. would give the country a loan that would be backed in some fashion by Ukrainian rare earth minerals worth trillions of dollars.
[…]
Still, Trump liked the concept, GOP lawmakers who spoke to him said, and if he wins the election, some envision a new model taking hold in which the U.S. structures foreign aid not as grants, but instead as loans with countries putting up natural resources or other valuable assets as collateral.
Despite my total disdain for politics and government, I support President Trump. However, this idea is no better than the outright gifts of money we’ve been showering on other nations since the end of World War II:
- Government funds must be used for the purposes set out in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
- The U.S. is too heavily in debt to be financing anything, much less the governments of other nations.
- Repayment cannot be enforced, except by war – financially always a losing proposition.
The “foreign aid” scam has gone on long enough. It’s created billionaire dictators and immense welfare states. It’s turned the U.S. into the world’s piggy bank. And it’s helped to destroy the soundness of the dollar. And as if more were needed, most of the nations we’ve “aided” resent us, if they don’t hate us outright.
Let Isabel Paterson have the last word:
Loans made by one government to another do not answer to any of the proper conditions of credit. The money lent belongs to the people of the lending nation, not to the officials who grant the loan; and it becomes a charge upon the people of the borrowing nation, not upon the officials who negotiate the loan and spend the money. There is no collateral, and no means of collection by civil action. If the debt is not paid, war or the threat of war is the only recourse. Meantime private production is wrecked; the economy of the lending nation has to meet the capital loss; while the economy of the borrowing nation is loaded with the dead weight of government projects (buildings, armies, etc.) for which the money is spent. It is an infallible formula for disaster.
[Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine]
Give me a counter-argument, if you think you have one.
