Microloans May Be Just Another Form Of Welfare
11/08/2006
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Brenda Walker did a blog here recently titled Can Microloans Keep Millions at Home?, based on Muhammad Yunus 's work with the Grameen Bank which recently won him the Nobel Peace Prize. (I always suspect anyone who has won the Nobel Peace Prize. This includes Yasser Arafat, Le Duc Tho,Jimmy Carter, and a number of others who were given prizes for preventing World Wars One and Two, which went ahead and happened anyway.)

Jeffrey Tucker has a story on Mises.org [Microcredit or Macrowelfare: The Myth of Grameen Posted on 11/8/2006 ] which is skeptiical of Muhammad Yunus's success, which lacks a lot in the way of evidence, and distrusts the collectivist spirit of the Microloan administrators, who say things like

  • "We shall take part in all social activities collectively."
  • "We shall grow vegetables all the year round. We shall eat plenty of them and sell the surplus."
  • "We shall build and use pit-latrines."
  • "If we come to know of any breach of discipline in any centre, we shall all go there and help restore discipline."

which, as he says, is "very strange" for a bank. He suggests that people in Third World countries would do better with fewer regulations preventing them from making money. (This was roughly the position of the late Peter Bauer. ) But the idea that people in Third World contries thould be able to stay home is a good one, however it's achieved. And if people do have to leave Pakistan for economic reasons, they don't have to come to America.

 

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