Arise Sir Bob, and piss off.

Arise Sir Bob, and piss off. Why do I say that? Well, like Lindsay Mitchell,

[I] heard him on radio lambasting New Zealand for our governments 'pathetic' contributions to international aid. Good. Governments give away taxpayer's money willy-nilly. Has he looked at New Zealander's support for private agencies like World Vision and CCF?

We put our money where we know agencies are getting results because they account to us. Govt to govt aid is probably the most likely to be subject to corruption.

Geldof is well-intended I know, and likeable to boot but... talk about a statist.

Yes. He is. Good intentions aren't enough. Good thinking is as important, if not more important. Geldof needs to be asked of the money's he himself raised: "What Happened to the Fucking Money?" In fact, he has been asked, by one Daniel Wolf in The Spectator and as I mentioned here at the time it turns out that most of it went to the corrupt governments that had been starving the people Geldof had been wanting to help. David Rieff expained in Prospect Magazine:

The millions donated to Ethiopia in 1985 thanks to Live Aid were supposed to go towards relieving a natural disaster. In reality, donors became participants in a civil war. Many lives were saved, but even more may have been lost in Live Aid's unwitting support of a Stalinist-style resettlement project ... The standard argument is that to do nothing is to acquiesce in whatever horror is unfolding, from Saddam Hussein's Iraq to the mass killings in present-day Darfur.... Yet an alternative case can be made: in the global altruism business it is, indeed, sometimes better not to do anything at all.

As Mugged By Reality said at the time, "People were not starving they were being starved." And giving was not saving them from being starved, it was helping to starve them. It was feeding and succouring their oppressors. People want to help, and to feel better about themselves they sometimes give until it hurts -- but in this case its the ones that were being helped that the giving hurt. As Daniel Wolf says, "The story of Band Aid is the story of us, not them."

If your or Sir Bob truly wanted to help the starving of Africa and he really wanted to think about it, he might realise that what the have-nots haven't got is freedom, and capitalism, and he might want to get active to get more capitalism and more freedom and better property rights for those he wants to help.

He could start with Zimbabwe.

UPDATE: Whinging in New Zealand has a lighter take:

Geldof slams NZ third world efforts?
That's what the news announcer said: "Geldof slams New Zealand third world efforts". Obviously Geldof has not been paying attention - in the past six years, New Zealand has made fantastic strides toward becoming a third world country. Sir Bob ( artist , humanitarian and major ego) has not done his homework on this one.

RELATED LINKS: How Band Aid came unstuck on reality of relief - Spectator (via The Scotsman)
Dangerous pity - David Rieff, Prospect Magazine Sorry, but... - Lindsay Mitchell
Altruism: It's about us, not about them - Not PC (Peter Cresswell), May 2005
Debt relief on bFM and elsewhere - Not PC (Peter Cresswell), June 2005
Live-8 losers - Not PC (Peter Cresswell), June 2005

TAGS: Politics-World, Ethics, Politics