13 thoughts on “Another Good Place To Cut The Budget”

  1. Simon mentions that he admired the UN at first because of the World Health Organization. Presuming that he still admires WHO, his article would have been stronger if he addressed what if anything the US might do to contribute to WHO’s goals once we stop contributing to the UN.

    Rand, you say that UN’s evil outweighs the good that it does. Do you really think that some evil prattle about racism (and the various other evils mentioned in the Simon article) really outweighs the good that the World Health Organization provides? How many lives would have to be saved by WHO and UNICEF and other health related organizations before that good would outweigh the Durban Conference on Racism? Or maybe by “good”, you just mean “good for you”, in which case I’d point out that WHO does quite a bit to stop pandemics which are a direct threat to your life.

    And that’s just health. I’m disgusted with the UN’s record in peacekeeping, and yet, they manage to do enormous good there too, enough to far outweigh the bad. East Timor, for example, is much better off due to the UN’s administration (even if it has faults, as all administrations do), and I’m not sure what other organization could have replaced the UN there.

  2. Snort! I should have googled first — I now discover my knowledge of East Timor is pretty out of date! I guess I just don’t keep up on East Timor. Well, I gather the UN’s role in East Timor has transitioned to helping with development. Still, the UN’s role there strikes me as one of sort of thing the UN is good for, beyond strictly humanitarian aid.

  3. Bob, I think the US would get much more bang for their buck in the world healthcare arena by supporting private healthcare foundations, such as the one established by Bill Gates, than by continuing to succor the grossly corrupt UN.

    Seems like that would be a win-win for both you and Rand..

  4. `Maybe. My understanding is that WHO can gain access to populations that would be closed to the US. If a foundation was viewed as being too much an agent of the US, it might not be seen as legitimate and politically acceptable. But I do agree that for health, one answer is to delink medicine and health care from the UN’s more controversial aspects. (Wait, did I just suggest that health care wasn’t political? Ha!)

  5. “Maybe. My understanding is that WHO can gain access to populations that would be closed to the US.”

    There do exist other sovereign nations that might be able or willing to donate some of their own funds directly if they were suddenly unable to direct our donations Bob.

    As it stands it’s acting like a giant money laundering operation with neither effective oversight nor credible internal policing with a mere 110% overhead.

    There’s no particular reason to think that having one (or two) mammoth bureaucracies as middlemen are better than “simply” skipping the middlemen and doing direct donations to the very long list of charitable organizations that the UN itself uses for distribution.

  6. About the only “good” I see the UN doing is providing employment for a bunch of otherwise worthless and unemployable parasites. Oh, it does provide an excellent forum for totalitarian governments. We shouldn’t discount that.

  7. ” My understanding is that WHO can gain access to populations that would be closed to the US.”

    So?

    Seriously. If a country won’t take aid because of who it came from, then they must not want it very badly.

  8. There’s no need for a UN in order for the world to have effective multinational organisations. The postal system existed long before the UN. Likewise a series of international agreements would provide weather data, an agreed international civil aviation system etc.

    As for East Timor, currently being run by a corrupt bunch of former communists who sat out the guerilla war against the Indonesians in southern Africa, the less said the better. UN my arse. It was Australian soldiers with vital and irreplaceable US logistics support who kept the peace there. We should have rounded up these so called leaders while we had plenty of soldiers there, given them the choice of being shot or living in Australia with no political activity allowed, handed the place back to the Indonesians along with a billion dollars and a abject apology.
    Everyone does know why the US and even Australia’s leftist government let the Indonesians take over in 1975 don’t they? The Portugese bugged out after being incessantly criticised at the UN over their colonial policy. The alternative to the Indonesian takeover was a People’s Republic of East Timor run as a Soviet satellite. Given the location that would have been a fine opportunity for the USSR in 1975 in the middle of the cold war.

  9. Rick C,

    To wipe out an infectious disease entirely (like smallpox, and maybe polio someday soon), you need access. To stop a pandemic flu, you need access.
    Also, to do good deeds for completely innocent children (and adults), you need access.

    Larry J,

    The UN general meeting (and various conferences) do provide a platform for dictators and evil regimes. But it would be a mistake to think of the UN as just a congress or parliament (and it would be a mistake to think of the UN as just the WHO, although I’m focusing on health.) Visit the UN website to see everything they do.

    By the way, it was the report of the UN inspectors in Iraq that convinced me that Iraq was building WMDs and should be pre-emptively stopped. This was in the 1990s, before Bush, before Powell’s UN testimony. I trusted Clinton and Albright, but the UN reports really sealed the deal for me.

  10. I have thought we should defund the UN ever since I learned that such stalwart supporters of human rights as China, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba were on the Human Rights Council. The UN is a place where the inmates are running the asylum and we should get out.

  13. “I’m disgusted with the UN’s record in peacekeeping, and yet, they manage to do enormous good there too, enough to far outweigh the bad.”

    Where Bob? Allowing Hezbollah to re-arm and raping children are out weighed where?

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