My letter to Time Magazine

In his essay The Class system of Catastrophe, Jeffrey Sachs uses the occasion of the recent tsunami disaster in South East Asia to promote his pet agenda: increased American foreign aid to the third world. Mr. Sachs correctly notes that the scourge of natural disaster is wrought more devastatingly in poor than rich nations. However, his proposal, increased development aid to impoverished countries, is merely a band aid solution that will do nothing to rectify the underlying problem. What is desperately needed in the third world is an ethos of personal responsibility, and government that recognizes individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In short, what the third world desperately needs is not more aid, but more capitalism.