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Monday, January 03, 2005
de Tocqueville Be Damned
After painting the Western industrialized nations (and likely the US in particular) as "stingy," the United Nations Undersecretary for Humanitarian blah blah, Jan Egeland and his whole putrified beadledom has left me on tenterhooks as it were. The voluble Wretchard has several excellent posts on the topic which puts as fine a point on the issue as the substrate can maintain - read them and be edified.
For some pith on the issue, consider the words of Dr. Charles Krauthammer:"We are six percent or less of the world's population, yet we give almost half. We are a very small number of people, relatively speaking, and we carry the weight of a dozen countries. Secondly, we maintain a military structure that keeps the peace of the world...Who is in the Indian Ocean with the aircraft carriers, helicopters, skilled personal? No one has the infrastructure in the world, we spend almost half a trillion dollars a year on our military structure, which is essentially the fire department of the planet and is it always at the disposal of people hit in a national disaster...Incidentally on food aid, we five 60% of all the food aid in the world. It is simply irresponsible to talk about the U.S. as anything other than the most generous nation on the planet." Fnord.
posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 1:35 AM ·
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