Yesterday, while the Senate worked toward finalizing an important bill “implementing unfinished recommendations of the 9/11 Commission to fight the war on terror more effectively, to improve homeland security, and for other purposes,” Senator Maria Cantwell saw an opportunity to offer an amendment of her own. The purpose of that amendment:
Eliminating global poverty is surely an admirable goal . . . but how exactly is the president supposed to achieve the elimination of global poverty? Well, that’s all left rather vague–the important thing in Senator Cantwell’s proposal, it seems, is that we’ll have a big plan to figure all this out. Alas, the long, sad history of foreign aid is littered with well-meaning calls for precisely this kind of top-down, centralized plan to end poverty–despite their recurring failure to actually work. Writing in the Washington Post a while back, the distinguished economist William Easterly of New York University explained why. Reviewing a book by Jeffrey Sachs, the leading acolyte of the “big plan,” Easterly wrote:
