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There are ethical ways to reduce humanitarian aid. Eliminating it all at once ain't it.
> There are ethical ways to reduce humanitarian aid. Eliminating it all at once ain't it.
The nature of government-funded programs is that the actual source of the funding, the taxpayer, has very little direct say in it, and the people who are involved have very little incentive to remove it. Politicians love attaching their names to bigger and bigger budget numbers in headlines, and of course the people whose salaries depend on that budget aren't inclined to make it go away.
Every now and then the taxpayer gets fed up and elects some boor to make a hatchet job out of it, and intellectuals remark on how heartless it all is.
To me, the true ethical blame is on whoever it is that allowed these millions of people to be permanently dependent on aid.
It's humanitarian aid funded by the American taxpayer and brought to life by every dedicated worker involved. To choose to stop being a part of this chain of actions is to go from acting on something good to becoming neutral, not becoming evil. What's next, calling someone ethically culpable for quitting their USAID job?
Yet with USAID they cut it the next month, meaning people have died, without any warning.
If they had done this by saying "We will cut off this funding starting 2027, other countries, foundations, organizations, etc would have time to plan/divert/ramp up to fill the gaps.
Your argument fails, not on principle, but on details.
You can talk about this in the abstract all you want, but at the end of the day, someone chose to let people suffer and die when a far more humane approach with the same financial outcome could have been taken. For flash. For pizzaz. For revenge, perhaps.
That’s fucking evil.
I explicitly said it is not fine, please don't put words in my mouth.
There isn’t any other way to look at it.
I think if someone decided to save money by shutting off water to Phoenix or Los Angeles, they will have some portion of the relevant blood on their hands. That's especially true if they did so with zero effort toward a smooth transition.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."