A victory for African farmers

Humanitarian aid group CARE has opted not to accept $45 million in government aid. Repeating that, a non-profit group has turned down $45,000,000 from the U.S. government to supply food from Africa. The reason? The "heavily subsidized American farm products" drive down the cost of African-produced crops, which negatively affects African farmers.

Under the current system, the money raised through selling the American crops is redistributed in Africa into anti-poverty programs. The Government Accountability Office has already declared that this program is inherently inefficient, but little has been done to stop the program because of all the special interests involved - farmers, shipping companies who move the food to Africa, and particularly the non-profits whose existence is financed by the plan (yes, that's right, a "special interest group" is more than just Big Oil and lobbyists).

Other groups who work in tandem with CARE are not pleased with CARE's decision, but Progressively Right applauds the effort. Even Jimmy Carter, who I rarely find myself on common ground with, agrees:

Former President Jimmy Carter, whose Atlanta-based Carter Center uses private money to help African farmers be more productive, said in an interview that it was a flawed system that had survived partly because the charities that received money from it defended it.

But doesn't the competition of the American food with the African food promote innovation? Isn't that what a market economy wants? Normally, yes. However, this program sells subsidized food at below market value. African farmers can't make an honest living because they are forced into dishonest competition.

This case proves once again that just because government has the best of intentions does not mean it will get the best of results. Congratulations to CARE for standing up to this program and, really, to its own mission. I hope this will force a more robust of both foreign aid and of our own domestic farm subsidies.

Fertile Ground

In 2002, if you had randomly selected one hundred politically conservative adults in America (none from the same families), you would have found, between them, 212 children. If you had selected a hundred liberal adults, they would have had 156 children. This gap is primarily caused by religious differences and marriage patterns.

That's from Arthur Brooks' truly excellent book, Who Really Cares: America's Charity Divide, in the section on how families and upbringing play into how charitable we are. Conservatives are more charitable in general, and this particular sentence illustrates how it is easier for conservatives to pass down charitable traits to new generations - there are simply more of them to pass it down to.

This statistic suggests there is an increasing number of people who are predisposed to a conservative message. Why, then, do Republicans, the partisan torch-bearer for rightward-thinking individuals, not have a permanent lock on elections?

I think it has less to do with ideas and more to do with personalities. When Real People conservatives see their politicians selling out conservative principles, the party label begins to stand for nothing.

I think this is the hole the GOP currently has to climb its way out of. Unfortunately, I am not yet convinced that the GOP establishment realizes it is in this hole.

Georgia Public Policy Foundation

One email I look forward to each week is the Friday Facts email from the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. The email always highlights interesting things.

I also like it because I think it's an excellent development (in the fundraising sense of the word) tool. It keeps the organization in the mind of donors and makes them feel connected to its work. And, also notable, is that it frames GPPF as a dispenser of knowledge. They don't have to create all the information that's there, and that probably makes it even more effective because donors and activists can see GPPF as finding these interesting things for me - they are doing me a favor! - and so I'll pay attention to those things of theirs that they highlight.

Here are a couple items from today's Friday Facts email, both of which happen to be environmentally focused:

• Warming by worming? Open University researcher Jim Frederickson reports that worms produce greenhouse gases 290 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Worms are being used commercially to compost organic material instead of putting it into landfills. The German government wants 45 percent of all waste to be composted by 2015. The Composting Association has called for data on worms and composting to be re-examined. Source: Materials Recycling Week
  
• Those so-called Lexus lanes – high-occupancy toll lanes – save motorists more than time during rush hour. The Wall Street Journal reports that a Minneapolis worker who uses the 11-mile express lane on I-394 to get home quickly to her disabled husband has paid as much as $6 in tolls in brutal traffic. She discovered another benefit: She burns about a quarter of a tank of gas a week in the express lane, down from a half-tank in the slower-moving regular lanes. Source: Wall Street Journal

You can get on the mailing list at their website at www.gppf.com.

Volunteer-Coordinator-in-Chief

Chris Dodd, erstwhile Democratic candidate for president, has an idea:

He proposes making community service mandatory for all high school students, doubling the size of the Peace Corps by 2011 and expanding the AmeriCorps national service program to 1 million participants by the end of his presidency.

Requiring community service will give high school students a chance to acquire new skills while meeting the needs of their communities, Dodd said.

"If the chat rooms and online communities of today show us anything, it is that young people yearn for shared experiences," he said. "All they are missing, in my view, is leadership from us to redirect that interest toward community service."

I am overwhelmed by the arrogance of this. Expanding AmeriCorp - fine. Expanding Peace Corps - fine, as long as their doing productive things. But mandatory volunteerism? That's just oxymoronic, with emphasis on the "moronic."

Conscripting kids into community service has all sorts of problems. First is the apathy problem. Online communities are cool with kids because they get to go and forge their own identities. They opt into participation. But teenagers, broadly speaking, do not respond well to being forced to do things. You have to let kids decide what's hip - you can't force hip on kids.

The second problem is a supply-and-demand problem. Required community service leads to too many people available for not enough substantive tasks, leading to make-work community service instead of service that actually adds value in society. And, in fact, you may undermine and severely hurt important efforts because kids who have no interest in being there will purposefully do a bad job.

I'm glad we are hearing more policy proposals out of presidential candidates, and at least conscription-based community service doesn't involve spending taxpayer money (at least on its surface). However, let's hope that the candidates contemplate more than just the p.r. value of their ideas and actually give thought to how the secondary and tertiary effects of those ideas help better society - or, in Dodd's case, don't.