Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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?
Published in General
If we build that wall. Then wouldn’t Mexico feel more pressure to maintain it’s protocapitalism?
I don’t want a Venezuela on our border. That’s why I think Trump’s wrong to berate an automaker for siting a new plant in Mexico. A productive, less poor country to our south would be a good thing for Mexico and the U.S.
I don’t know what, if anything failed states have in common, but I’d guess it’s the absence of the rule of law? Not law, the rule of law. There were a number in Africa where infant economies became socialist because the post colonial leaders who had been educated in socialism in Western universities, centralized power. They were tribal societies so foreigners and non favored tribes were either banished crushed or targeted for genocide and then tribes reversed the order of oppression. In Venezuela non tribal relatively homogenous people, oil wealth financed socialism until prices fell along with oil production exposing the flight of productive people and capital. They had a strong security apparatus run by Cubans but people either left or stoped producing. They protected property but only their own. Mexico isn’t a failed state but parts of it are completely dysfunctional where a combination of over centralization of power and the inability of that power to do the basics government must do, such as protect citizens and property. Large parts of Colombia were completely controlled by narco terrorists where the central government had no presence or influence, we could call these areas failures of the state. When Uribe took over he strengthened the military, got help with technology and weapons from the Americans and went after and conquered the Narco terrorists. He also tried to reform the judicial system, strengthened the economy by reducing oppressive regulations, protectionism and encouraged foreign investment. He reversed the drift and established control. El Salvador, Honduras and parts of Mexico inherited the drug business Uribe pushed out of Colombia and now they are narco states on their way to becoming failed states. The Philippines was on it’s way to becoming a failed state as Ferdinand Marcos was sick to govern and the people around him too corrupt to do so and the communists were filling the vacuum as the Marcos system crumbled. Colombia was poor and decentralized so that different cultures emerged in different parts of the country and they lived in relative peace and growing prosperity; then coffee went from $1.00 a lb to $6.00 folks invaded available steep soil and water rich higher lands in Antioquia the wealthy cattle ranchers had not wanted. This new wealth financed the roads and railroads that connected the previously remote departments, but also exposed the new rich peasants, to lawlessness as they were out of the protective reach of either Departmental or National governments. A half century of violence ensued. Are some of our urban ghetto’s or backward rural areas failed states? Does the state function in them to protect property and lives, do their schools function? is there growing investment and a private sector? We can’t say the state is not present they pay a lot for schools, police and welfare but they fail to govern so I’d call those failed states as well.
I don’t remember seeing many examples of Weimar having tried, even a tiny bit. It seemed to be a regime of contented bureaucrats ignoring catastrophe while they spent their days playing the German version of pinochle.
Well your view has some merit. When your failure brings the Nazis to power it is hard to give them credit to anything. The bureaucrats organized successful peaceful resistance to France when they invaded the Ruhr valley. They renegotiated the reparation payments that were crushing the German economy. They also organized a government in the post war chaos out of nothing. Their main problem was lack of real legitimacy in the German culture. Without this legitimacy they had a hard time taking the hard stance against the Communist and the Fascists and that lack of legitimacy eventually allowed the Nazis to take them down.
They really did made a real effort to take an autocratic German Empire and tried to turn it into a functioning Republic and just about managed it under extremely bad circumstances. I think they deserve a bit of sympathy even though in the end they must be judged on their failure and what that failure unleashed on the world.
In high school, the only thing that really got mentioned was how the Versailles Treaty and its reparations package set the world up for WWII. In Milton Mayer’s classic “They Thought They Were Free” he discussed how the 80 billion dollars that was part of the reparations would not have been paid off until the early 1980’s!
I once spent two days in the central library of Denver Colorado, just reading through its collection of old Look and Life magazines. In the mid 1930’s, Adolf Hitler was praised by both magazines for uniting Austria under Germany and unifying his country and bringing it forward from where the country had been in the 1920’s. Reading those magazines, it was not possible to envision we would be fighting Hitler and his Third Reich just five years later.
Churchill was prescient.