It’s the Government’s Fault

Expanding on my earlier assertion that people cannot be starving in mass numbers unless the government has failed and/or is corrupt.

by Jerry Agar

In an earlier post written while I was in Haiti I asserted that when most of the population of a country is starving, uneducated and living in squalor, it is always the government’s fault.

There are a number of reasons.

In “The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else,” Hernando De Soto explains that an underground economy cannot build wealth.  Formal systems of property ownership, protected by law, are required for people to be able to build off of the equity they create.  Subsistence living does not allow for anything other than day-to-day survival.

De Soto writes, “In Haiti, one way an ordinary person can settle legally on government land is first to lease it from the government for five years and then buy it. Working with associates in Haiti, our researchers found that to obtain such a lease took 65 bureaucratic steps requiring, on average, a little more than two years. All for the privilege of merely leasing the land for five years.”

Thomas Sowell adds, “Bureaucracy and legal systems which are too complicated often cause people to use illegal or informal ways to invest and buy property. It is bad for the whole country to not let every person have legal property rights because without these rights there will not be as much investment, hurting the economy.”
Who creates bureaucracy and legal systems?  It is the government.

In much of Haiti the government has failed to provide basic infrastructure.  The roads are nothing short of deplorable.  When our host, Pastor Jepthe Lucienne, heard of the earthquake, he left his central Haiti town of Pignon with trucks to bring people out of the damaged area.  The trip is less than 90 miles each way, but due to the road conditions he could only do it once a day.  Imagine planning to move goods – especially food – over that road.

Clean water and sanitation are often non-existent.  Life expectancy in Haiti is less than 61 years.  At the end of a twisted maze of narrow passages between buildings in Port-au-Prince, we found a family – the father had died – living in a hovel with a dirt yard the size of a small bedroom.  The youngest son has – we think – cerebral palsy.  He has nowhere to go.  There is no medical care for him as his mother has no money and no job.

We argue in America about how involved the government should be in health care, but what happens to a population that has no money, no way to get money, and little health care available if they did?

When James Meeks spoke at a recent Illinois Policy Institute event, he had just come back from Haiti.  He mentioned that the high school graduation rate is one percent.  The people of Haiti are faced with bad public schools in some communities and no school at all in others.  Private school is the best option, if there is one and if someone pays for it.  But with almost no one getting a basic high school education, Haiti has a thin bench from which to draw the problem solvers of the future.  Education is a nation’s most important assurance of on-going survival.

Often, when countries receive international aid, the money and goods are stolen by the government.  Haiti suffered from just such government thievery from Papa Doc to Aristide.  The United States, as a result, cut off aid from 2001 to 2004.

Some people argue that local populations are taken advantage of by big European and American corporations that come in to an underdeveloped county, set up a factory and rape the nation of natural resources while exploiting the people.  In Haiti for instance, a large portion of the land is used to grow export crops for Europe and America, as opposed to food for Haitians.  If and when foreign development is destructive, is it the local population – desperate for any job at all – or the national government that is in a position to ensure that the county benefits?

I don’t pretend to know how to overcome the systemic problems in Haiti or any other devastated nation, but I think it is obvious whose responsibility it ultimately is figure that out.  And who to blame.