Freedom spurs growth
Human nature limits individual production when government redistributes labor’s product rather than protecting property.
Economic progress occurs when government protects private property, leaving individuals free to provide for themselves, start businesses, create employment and products, and loan to those hoping to improve their own lives.
Democratically elected governments needing to tax are more accountable to citizens than oligarchies, fed through corruption, using foreign aid (wealth redistribution) to increase their power and control of their people instead of infrastructure investment and protecting natural rights.
Heritage Foundation’s Economic Freedom Index comparing economic freedom indicators in 180 countries clarifies freedom’s economic benefits.
Central America’s second-most impoverished nation, Honduras, received $1.7 billion U.S. in foreign aid between 2007 and 2016.
With the second greatest world-wide homicide rate, Honduras ranks 94th freest nation out of 180 nations, scored a 28.2 percent government integrity, and 34.5 in judicial effectiveness on 2018’s economic freedom index.
About 80 percent of Honduras’s private land is without title or mis-titled.
Would $50 billion in aid help citizens ruled by corrupt oligarchies neglecting life and private property protection vital to increasing living standards?
Thomas Sowell reminds that Cuba’s economic situation didn’t improve when refugees left behind their wealth.
Millions of Russians, excluding the communist oligarchy, starved after communists seized farmers’ products.
Farmers stopped producing more than their own needs.
Poverty remains oligarchic governments’ chronic legacy.
Demoralizing wealth redistribution erodes freedom and productivity incentives of the plundered and beneficiaries, undermines the beneficiaries’ self-worth from self-support loss and doesn’t produce lasting economic gains for the impoverished.
Susan Shotthafer,
Port Angeles