Financial aid hasn't worked...

U.S. Must Help Haiti Embrace Markets


Disaster: President Obama showed real leadership last week, offering words of hope and a U.S. aircraft carrier to quake-leveled Haiti. But for this majestic effort to be lasting, more than structures must be rebuilt.
Less than three days after a mighty earthquake flattened the poorest country in the hemisphere, the greatest nation on earth was at Haiti's door, breaking through ruined ports, trashed highways and anarchic gangs to aid the poorest of the poor, reeling from losses so catastrophic they must feel like strangers in their own land.
The president spoke for America when he offered his consolation to Haitians, "You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten. In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you." Empathizing with them, and yet humbly acknowledging the limits, Obama assured them: "You must know that help is arriving."
This was Obama's finest foreign policy hour and all Americans should feel pride in what he said and did. But to honor this U.S. mobilization — both from our government and our citizens, churches, aid groups and corporations — the Haiti effort must yield something permanent.
No one wants to see the $100 million trove in American emergency aid stabilize the country for awhile, only to see Haiti collapse again from another disaster a few years on.
In short, we must help Haiti come out of this a better nation.
Cities like San Francisco can survive 7.0 earthquakes, as it did in 1989, but poor countries like Haiti cannot. The difference isn't luck, nor a "curse," as the Rev. Pat Robertson foolishly theorized, nor global warming, as actor Danny Glover ignorantly claimed.
It's prosperity.
It's hard to imagine a country like Haiti beating the persistent poverty that has afflicted it through its history — based not just on vast reparations payments to France for its independence, and an unjustly imposed isolation from world trade in the 19th century, but on tangible plagues too: corruption, illiteracy and lack of rule of law.
As hard as such problems are to fix, it doesn't take magic. With the American presence in Haiti likely to be extended, the U.S. needs a strategy to strengthen the state and expand the free market, the solutions that work every time they're tried.
The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal's 2009 Index of Economic Freedom ranks Haiti a wretched 147 out of 179 countries in economic freedom, citing glaring deficiencies in property rights (earning 10 points of a possible 100) and corruption (16 of 100), and pretty bad indicators on business freedom, investment freedom and financial freedom, (30-37 of 100).
These signal that special interests are having a grand old time in Haiti, but the citizens have cruelly been held back. Which is sad because Haitians flourish in conditions of freedom — Haitian-Americans are an industrious and increasingly successful group in various parts of the U.S. Right off, the U.S. should come up with a boot-camp program to train officials and educate legislators.
It should extend free trade to get Haitian industries off the ground. And it should get Haiti prosperous for the long haul.
If that sounds hopeless, know that Haiti's own government was already moving in that direction. What's more, the region abounds with nations that have risen miraculously from hopeless debacles by embracing free markets.
Take Colombia, a war-wracked country that reached failed-state status in 1998, but rose from devastation to become one of Latin America's brightest stars in 2002. It did it with U.S. help, through Plan Colombia, which strengthened the state and disempowered gangs. It can now be a blueprint for Haiti.
Meanwhile, Chile, a poor, geographically challenged nation that lived under dictatorship for much of its existence, reached First World status last month as the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development's newest member. Chile embraced capitalism with results no one could have imagined just 20 years ago.
Catastrophic events are capable of changing culture, as Samuel Huntington noted, and Haiti is at just such a crossroads. The great effort the U.S. has mustered to rescue a neighbor at its hour of need must be geared to transforming Haiti with free markets.