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Comment by luckydonkey | Hacker News Reader

> Now they have money and power and use both in pretty obscene ways, like starving children in Africa to death by yanking the aid that was keeping them alive away.

It’s because there’s lot of corruption in places receiving aid, look it up. Fixing problems is not as simple as giving someone money, there needs to be lots of accountability, which is often missing. There are fake NGOs and non-profits which essentially treat these foreign aid monies as slush funds. It makes sense to tighten the purse strings for now while the national debt crisis is looming large. It would also be great if other high GDP nations would contribute to this kind of development.

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The aide money wasn't there to fix things, it was there for soft power.

Once you understand that it makes a whole lot more sense why corruption was never really addressed and things didn't really get better.

The way it works was simple "Do what we want you to do OR ELSE we'll pull your aide. It'd be a shame if that happened".

That is ultimately the power that allowed the US to keep these countries in check. To make them follow US trade policy in lock step.

To sell that to the american public was simply masking the whole thing as giving aide.

Now, I think it's wrong to just completely pull the plug. The aide wasn't doing nothing and it wasn't just soft power. The needed reform shouldn't have happened in one big action.

That's how it started but over time the program was captured by bureaucrat insiders to line their own pockets.

It won't let me reply, but I agree. I think when organizations are new and shiny the stakeholders are excited and pay attention. Over time attention shifts to the new shiny thing and only inertia and self dealing keep the organization together.

Bureaucrat insiders lining their pockets has been happening from the beginning. That's a part of the soft power. It keeps everyone in line so long as the money pipeline keeps on flowing.

One of the most famous scandals was the Teapot Dome scandal of 1923 [1], long predating UAID (1961). It has exactly the same make up of corruption that people critique USAID of having.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome_scandal

Is corruption so evil that it's worth killing a huge number of people to reduce it? Aid being diverted to people who don't need it is a real problem, but solving it by cutting off the aid is rather extreme.

As far as the debt goes, the amounts involved are inconsequential. You're going to cause all those deaths to delay sovereign default or hyperinflation by a few hours.

Moralizing people have some really bizarre moral utility functions. Somehow more people is always more better and any kind of finite reality does not apply. It's like a moral ponzi scheme.

> Fixing problems is not as simple as giving someone money

I've heard the exact opposite. Usually it's the strings attached that end up being perfect for the corrupt to grab onto and manipulate.

Or it's going to be corrupt no matter what. Like life, corruption finds a way.

The solution to that corruption can't be to just stop giving aid or hiring your own (corrupt) NGOs. That's the whole problem with DOGE. Instead of taking on the difficult work of making things more efficient they did a quick hit and run job to cut things they didn't understand or Musk didn't like.

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