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The Moral Obligation of Failed States
Francis Fukuyama declared an end to history because the only viable political ideology left standing was liberal democracy. He was not wrong that this was the most logical outcome if the world were rational but we know that it isn’t. Various forms of tribalism and stupidity continue to delay the “end of history.”
Given the demonstrable superiority of political systems that combine even-handed rule of law, limited government, and market economics, doesn’t that mean every nation has a moral obligation to do what works? Sweden and the USA differ on the scope of government’s role in provision of social welfare but both systems protect property, freedom of contract, capital accumulation, and market economics. Failed nations do not do that.
If poverty creates a moral obligation on other nations, why isn’t there an obligation to prevent its occurrence within the nation where is occurs?
We hear a great deal from religious and political leaders about the West’s moral obligations to accept immigrants from failed states and also to provide aid to those states. But why don’t the people of failed states have an equal or greater moral obligation to reform, to imitate successful nations, to do what works?
Mexico (speaking of failed states) uses its own people as an export crop. The remittances from legal and illegal Mexican residents in the US are now the single largest source of income for Mexico. In my humble opinion, any nation that sells its own people for cash is a disgrace. Any national government that continues a legal, political, and social culture that does not work, and thus creates systemic poverty, is both immoral and illegitimate.
Why doesn’t Pope Francis tell the leaders of Honduras, Mexico, et al., that they must immediately emulate nations that work? Pick one: Japan, Canada, Norway, etc., or mix and match. But they need to knowingly crush out habits, cultural elements, and ideas that do not work in the modern world. Japan did that in the 19th century. It is not impossible.
In any event, what has to end is the stupid assumption that poverty is caused by the existence of wealth in successful nations, that this disparity creates a one-sided moral obligation, and that that is the end of the moral discussion.
If I were screw up my life and needed to crash on your couch and feed from your ‘fridge, I fully expect to be compelled to accept and act upon your conditions and advice to cure my defective status. Similarly, if Mexico receives $27 billion dollars a year from exported human beings now in the US, and if every American household now has an average tax burden of over $1,000 to cover the state, local, and federal costs associated with illegal aliens, Mexico sure as hell better be prepared to accept and act upon some advice regarding reform. Don’t they and any other failed states that presume upon our benevolence have a moral obligation to shut up and do what they’re told to correct their defective condition unless and until they cease being a drain on us? Why instead are we the ones expected to shut up and pay up?
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Brilliant. Well done, sir.
(In that second-to-last sentence, it should be “do what they’re told”.)
Mexico isn’t actually all that bad with the exception of their south. There are many worse countries in Latin America and in quite alot in Africa.
Excellent! Too profound for just a Like.
Good point. When Pope Francis sees someone who is sober and productive and someone else who rarely works and spends most of his time drinking, I expect the pontiff while chide the sober man for hogging all the sobriety, causing the other man to be a drunk.
The failed states’ only success stories are its leader and his/her cronies. Those outside and inside cannot do anything but hope they fail. The poor inside are trying to survive against thugs who are getting fed, and those outside are best to try to mind their own business. I do think giving foreign aid to despotic regimes is bad policy.
Great idea, @oldbathos. Too bad we’re the only ones who like it. Sigh.
The post is a bit foolish. First we have no moral obligation to follow any particular policy because each policy has to be taken on its own terms. Cash transfers to poor regimes or failed states may or may not help and have to be considered carefully. We have a general moral obligation to help people as we can and to respect them, their natural rights and their country. How we got about that tactically is up for debate and no tactic of “helping” people has a natural moral advantage over another. In so much as the post speaks on this issue I agree with it.
Where the post becomes foolish is the advice it gives to countries to clean up their act and create wealth. 1789 France followed the authors advice and ended up with the terror, then corruption and then dictatorship. 1917 Russia also followed his advice and ended up with the Communists. Even the Wiemar Republic tried to do this an ended up with the Nazis. You can follow the American example and not get the American results.
This part is particularly bad, “
Have the Government crush, habits, cultural elements and ideas that do not “work” in the modern world? Stalin himself nods sagely at such advice.
Nations that need economic growth and the rule of law for their people need organic cultural change. It can’t be imposed. For that change they need to make different cultural assumptions and demand honesty from a sturdy, political framework. Christian mission is wonderful way to help people, as are welcoming students that can see what is good in the American system and do the hard work of translating these cultural values back to their own people. The American revolution is not an easy thing to pull off, it it was it would have been replicated by now. If we want other countries to do it successfully we need to help but not all the “help” we offer is useful…
Your interpretation of remittances seems rather unfair. Mexicans aren’t forced into America and they work for their money doing legitimate jobs (by and large). They then also choose to send their money back to family members not the Mexican government, though I don’t know if the Mexican government taxes the remittances, either way it isn’t a requirement of their work in America that they do so. Your humble opinion of the situation makes it sound like Mexicans in American are like North Korean workers in Russia, who are defacto slave labor sold to the logging industry there for the direct financial benefit of the North Korean regime.
@brianwolf, I don’t think you have to interpret Bathos’s advice as a call for any kind of Maoist cultural revolution.
It is not the workers sending money home that I judge harshly. It is the fact that their government actively encourages their departure rather than institute reforms that would allow those hard workers to stay home and prosper.
No you don’t and I am sure that he didn’t mean it that way. But really it is not good advice in any context.
The essay notes that: “Mexico (speaking of failed states) uses its own people as an export crop. The remittances from legal and illegal Mexican residents in the US is now the single largest source of income for Mexico. In my humble opinion, any nation that sells its own people for cash is a disgrace. Any national government that continues a legal, political and social culture that does not work and thus creates systemic poverty is both immoral and illegitimate.”
Back circa 2003, it was stated that the Mexican economy was 25% dependent on oil revenues, 25% on tourism, 25% on drugs and other illegal activities, such as kidnapping for ransom, and 25% dependent on remittances sent by workers north of the border.
I imagine that the oil revenues might be in decline now that the USA is producing its own energy revenue stream, with the slack being taken up by remittances from workers up north. And meth production is still very much part of Mexico’s economy. I also believe it is likely that both legalized med marijuana and legalizing all marijuana has taken away the reason for transporting marijuana north for sale.
Not in any context? Was it a mistake to “crush” the Indian practice of suttee? Was it a mistake for the Meiji Japanese government to “emulate” the French, in military affairs?
The suttee no, but promoting individual rights is not really crushing it is up lifting. Protecting a persons rights is the Government most basic job. The government is protecting something more important. You can go to a foreign culture a see a habit or custom that “doesn’t work” in the modern world but the problem is that it has just not been harnessed the right way or properly been put into an appropriate context. Keeping the custom but helping it to work may be a far better thing than “crushing” it.
Still my point is probably too strong there are certain situations where force can be a beneficial to ending some bad cultural practices but almost every time the Civil Rights movement should be preferred to the Civil War, though I will say the Civil War is to be preferred to the status quo.
Let’s take it country by country shall we.
Pursuing bad policies are bad. Old Bathos is talking about economic and political reforms that actually create wealth and peace.
I recall a lecture by a visiting historian at Georgetown who said that the Norman invasion of Ireland was a disaster because they did not finish the job. Instead of creating an administrative state and a national identity as they did in England, they just did enough to keep Ireland from being an incipient nation, leaving large areas untouched.
I was reminded of that some years later when I read a controversial article by two African academics who said Africa should be recolonized by the UN to institute functioning governmental, judicial and economic entities within more natural national boundaries. They argued that Europeans should have finished the job of bringing (ideational) modernity to the people they conquered and owed it to Africa to finish the job.
My celtic ancestors failed to learn the political/cultural lesson from Caesar’s defeat of the (tribal) Gauls. Fifteen centuries after, tribal Irish lost at Kinsale. Eighteen centuries later an essentially tribal Scottish people were defeated at Culloden.
I don’t regret using the word “crush” with respect to removing disfunctional cultural structures because history teaches that if a people can’t find a way to effect radical change to achieve a viable form of modernity, eventually forces from the outside will do it to/for them.
I don’t propose we do the “crushing”. My essential point is that the narrative has to change and the traditional American argument for and insistent spread of liberal democracy become relentless and that we dispense with the silly leftist tropes that (a) the West’s success somehow makes others poor; (b) that it is we who need to change rather than our various dysfunctional global neighbors and (c) that we should be shy about expressing our disapproval of failed political cultures, especially when they expect us to accept millions of their economic refugees.
Very much agree the Civil Rights movement should be preferable to the Civil War. But I am quite afraid we are entering an era where a new Civil War might be in this nation’s cards.
When people here are reluctant to use their real names because doing so could cost them a job promotion or even their job, thinking what the next step or two down the same road might be absolutely horrifies me.
Actually, it should be “do what it’s told.”
Agreed!
Obviously true!
Also true!
What we disagree on is the government should be told to “crush” what doesn’t “work” in their society. Let the governments be encouraged, helped when we can, in ways that actually help, so that the government in charge of a people plays with the team they have in a way their people understand. This will allow organic cultural change, that might at times be violent or harsh, that will have roots in their culture.
Isn’t that what the NE and the West Coast keep saying about flyover country, and using the same logic?
Governments in failed states are more likely to be the defenders of dysfunctional ideas and practices than agents of reform. My exhortation (if I were to exhort) would be to the people in need of relief. Corruption, political movements based on envy and zero-sum delusions, criminal elements and theological fossils are the enemies of innovation and economic growth. This is a call for cognitive revolution. Ideally such change would be more St. Patrick— author of a movement that wiped out Irish paganism without violence or martyrdom—and less Robespierre.
Hence my caution in telling Government to “crush” anything.
Amen.
I thought of an important example of all this is the American Civil War it was bad as it was. But the War came about from a gradual and organic change in society were Slavery, while once promoted, became a shame. The South resisted this change but they new they were on the losing end of this argument. It was important that when the war started it was the South that was the aggressor. They rebelled against no act of tyranny to rebelled against a lawful election. Because of this there was no direct betrayal in the Civil War of the American ideal of government that made reconciliation possible. If the Union had acted as a tyranny and attacked the South without cause to crush a cultural practice the Civil War would have struck, I think, a mortal blow to the American experiment.
I think that is the difference I am getting at. At times people will resist positive change with violence and when that happens they must be stopped. The more organic a change that is to the culture the better chance the positive change will take place. I don’t think we are far apart here I just thought the way you put things was a little careless and didn’t help your main point. I hope you understand better where I was coming from as well.
OldB,
Exactly,
Why is there no emphasis by either politicians or media on the failed states that are the source of the migrants? We are now living in a world of emergent economies. If China and India can pull themselves up from subsistence level poverty than most other nations cease to have an easy excuse.
Of course, if you accept my hypothesis that Mass Migration is the new Slavery, then you see the incentive for the corporatist/statist cabal. Add to this naive socialists looking for more adult bedtime stories about the bad capitalists and you have yourself a very dangerous cabal.
The policy of unlimited mass migration is the giveaway. Any rational person can recognize that a finite society can only absorb so many migrants per year. The demand for unlimited mass migration is ridiculous on its face. Yet, this is exactly what is demanded.
Nice post.
Regards,
Jim
Uh, no. The author said to emulate polities that work. Only Weimar may be said to have tried. Certainly neither Lenin nor Robespierre were doing so.
The original revolution in France very much tried to follow the American model. They did so consciously Lafayette wrote as much back to his old friends in America. However their effort failed. The French were not American and did not appreciate liberty in the same way the American people did at the time. The same with Russia the Russia Revolution against the Czar had nothing to do with Lenin. Lenin rose up against a new democratic government and not against the Czar.
Excellent post, Jim. What I realize from my own life experiences is until people experience the effects of rampant immigration, they tend to remain in the pro-immigration camp. Of the 30 or so friends and acquaintances I had in the San Francisco Bay area, we all wanted to be able to consider ourselves “more intelligent, better educated, and more humane.” Only after dealing with a vast turn around of a society under attack by rampant immigration did most of those 30 people realize the mistake.
It’s important to realize that as you turn the TV on, & the reporter is standing there with the momma and the crying infant, while the graphic banner states “140 Hondurans need asylum” there is a reason that “140” is mentioned. The media under the Globalists’ control is not about to tell those who hold pro-immigrant inclinations that massive immigration is the goal of the Elite in both parties. The Democratic Leaders want voters; the “R” leadership wants warm bodies working under the table, or at places like meat packing plants in the MidWest where wages are now 1/3rd of what they were before recent immigration waves.
Mexico is more of a ‘possibly failing state’ than an actual failed one — it’s certainly not in the shape of Venezuela, and has actually taken some steps over the past few years to try and improve its declining oil sector through the free market, by eliminating the Pemex monopoly and allowing foreign companies back into the marketplace (mainly because the Eagle Ford shale in Texas extends across the Rio Grande into northern Mexico, and they need the U.S. fracking and horizontal drilling technology to take advantage of their underground geology).
However, what happens with and after the upcoming presidential election could have a major effect on Mexico’s future, since the country looks poised to elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador as their next leader, and his brand of leftist populism, if enacted full-bore, would likely reverse the recent free-market reforms and in a worst-case scenario, could take Mexico down towards the levels of at the very least Nicaragua under Ortega, if not Venezuela under Chavez and Maduro. If that happens, the current flow of people across the border could look like a trickle compared to the number of people who could be attempting to cross 4-5 years from now, since if the capital begins to outflow from Mexico the population will try and follow.