A skeleton without flesh

Consider this statement:

Global health programs can increase life expectancy or decrease child mortality, but ultimately, people want a higher standard of living.

Re-read that.

And now think about that age old wisdom in "health is wealth."

The guy who flatly declared that it is all about economics? Stephen Moore, who was trump's economic policy adviser during the campaign.  He  wants to gut foreign aid to nothing.  As a nutcase Republican, Moore had the formula to prescribe for development:

All these countries have to do is cut taxes, provide private property rights and get involved in global markets  

Yep, cut taxes, provide property rights, engage in international trade, and within a generation even the Central African Republic can become a Singapore!

What a piece of shithead!

I could never understand the right-of-center's worship of economic growth.  Thus, their endless worship of the economic "successes" like China, for instance.

trump now presiding over such a worship means that we in the US too are doing everything to behave like how China does.  trump's people are hell bent on removing regulations that give priority for the natural environment or labor over economics.  Bizarre and awful.

In this essay about capitalism, the author quotes the profound political thinker Karl Polanyi:

fascism strips democratic politics away from human society so that “only economic life remains,” a skeleton without flesh.

Protecting the flesh, and keeping it healthy, means discussing the very idea that the likes of Stephen Moore, paul ryan, and the way right-of-center maniacs hate: The safety net.

we’d be better off with redistributive programs that are universal—parental leave, national health care—rather than targeted. Benefits available to everyone help people without making them feel like charity cases. Kuttner reports great things from Scandinavia, where governments support workers directly—through wage subsidies, retraining sabbaticals, and temporary public jobs—rather than by constraining employers’ power to fire people. “We won’t protect jobs,” Sweden’s labor minister recently told the Times. “But we will protect workers.” Income inequality in Scandinavia is lower than here, and a larger proportion of citizens work. Maybe a government can insure higher pay for its workers by treating them as if they were, in and of themselves, valuable. True, Denmark’s spending on its labor policies has at times risen to as high as 4.5 per cent of its G.D.P., more than the share America spends on defense, and studies show that diverse countries such as ours find it harder to muster social altruism than more racially and culturally homogenous ones do. Nonetheless, programs like Social Security and Medicare, instituted when a communitarian ethic was still strong in American politics, remain popular. Why not try for more?

Unfortunately, the maniacs are dead set against this.  They would rather govern with a fascist in the Oval office, as long as they can carry out their political agenda.  And they actively sell such a "development" model across the world too! :(