re: #415 kirkspencer

Yellow peril much?

Seriously, however, your argument is shading into absolutism. If we send aid and a China company gets a mining contract and a French company gets the contract for building the stuff the aid is paying for, we still come out ahead. We get there first because the aided nation heads toward moving from needy to contributor on the global stage. We get there because we also trade with China and France.

Let’s put it another way. By your argument the Marshall plan was a waste of our money.

No, it wasn’t. We were sending aid to nations we believed would be our loyal allies, and we were right. Said nations also had reasonably honest governments, so we weren’t just pouring money down a rathole.