Mr. Bush, The $15 Billion Appeasement Won't Work

January 31, 2003

IRVINE, CA'If the $15 billion African AIDS package Mr. Bush proposed in his State of the Union speech was intended to appease the critics of his impending attack on Iraq, it won't work, says Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute.

Mr. Bush's altruistic giveaway of our money, says Dr. Brook, will not buy the world's approval nor stop the condemnation of the morally justifiable action that he is about to take against Iraq. As evidence, consider how Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, the country with the highest number of AIDS cases in Africa, has countered Mr. Bush's list of Iraqi atrocities: 'If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. It is the one power with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, [and] is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.'

As Ayn Rand observed, 'The givers are never blessed; the more they give, the more is demanded of them; complaints, reproaches and insults are the only response they get for practicing altruism's virtues (or for their actual virtues). Altruism cannot permit recognition of virtue'. If the giver is not kept under a torrent of degrading, demeaning accusations, he might take a look around and put an end to the self-sacrificing.' If Mr. Bush needs more proof that altruistic giveaways will not buy him world approval he should compare the staggering sums of foreign aid we have given away in the last fifty years to the number of 'friends' America has today.

If individual Americans voluntarily want to give their money to fight AIDS, they can do so privately. But when $15 billion is forcefully expropriated from taxpayers for Mr. Bush's appeasing altruistic gesture it is outrageous and immoral.

Ayn Rand Institute executive director Yaron Brook is available for interviews on this topic.

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