Bill Clinton would be a fine lad with whom to send our cow to market ... assuming you wanted to end up with a handful of beans.
North Korea is a hermit kingdom, run by psychotic Marxists (assuming that's not redundant) who have spent decades indoctrinating their benighted populace that they're lucky to live on starvation rations in what amounts to the world's largest prison camp.
The United States already sends North Korea 500 million metric tons of grain per year through the U.N. World Food Program. Dictator Kim Jong Il steals most of it it to feed his gargantuan army ... requiring us in turn to spend millions more defending South Korea.
And what has caused all this hunger? Not economic tyranny, surely. No, the dictator blithely reports -- and the world press politely parrots - that bad weather caused a crop failure in North Korea last year ... just as it has every year since 1948, while South Korea prospers.
What highly selective clouds.
Now, in return for a North Korean promise to stop testing long-range missiles, President Clinton has ordered economic sanctions against that tyranny to be lifted - the first significant easing of sanctions since 1947. We will now have free trade and air service with North Korea. Our banks will even be allowed to loan them our money - though almost as an afterthought, the president did decide the prohibition on sale of U.S. weapons to North Korea will remain in place, at least for now.
(The move "will allow the importation of most North Korean-origin goods into the United States,'' chortled a jubilant White House press secretary Joe Lockhart last Friday. Wow. We all know what a pent-up demand there is for (start ital)that(end ital stuff!)
Presidential spokesman Joe Lockhart described as "grossly inaccurate" accusations by Congressional Republicans that North Korea has just successfully used its long-range missile program to blackmail America into backing off the sanctions. (Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-N.Y. and chairman of the House International Relations Committee, calls it a return to "the cycle of extortion.")
Maybe that's true. Maybe Mr. Clinton, who likes to invite Chinese Red Army agents to White House sleepovers, didn't (start ital)need(end ital) to be blackmailed.
And in fact, giving isolated North Koreans a gander at our freedoms and the material wealth they produce might not be a bad tactic. Eventually, they're likely to grow a bit restive.
But in the meantime, if Mr. Clinton believes tyrant Kim Jong Il will keep his promises once his larders are re-stocked, then maybe he's something worse than a traitor.
Maybe he's just stupid.
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What is it about vice presidents and foreign policy?
A vice president doesn't have much to do, really. But - eyes on the golden ring - their handlers would always prefer to see the resume padded with something that can be offered up as "first-hand experience in foreign affairs."
Sometimes, Richard Nixon gets to debate Khruschchev in the kitchen, or write about the courage it took to survive fruit-throwing foreign mobs.
Others are less fortunate. Take Al Gore.
A few months back, we were regaled with tales of wonder about how Mr. Gore's personal touch had contributed so much to Russia's economic recovery. Now Russia's envoy to the International Monetary Fund has quit in disgrace, amidst headlines about billions in IMF aid being diverted back to the personal New York bank accounts of Moscow's kleptocracy, and the very same vice presidential handlers are assuring us the hapless Mr. Gore was "out of the loop," that he really had no idea where all that money was going.
No, he probably didn't. But amidst the predictable scramble to find someone to blame, we shouldn't lose sight of the bigger problem.
The old teachers had it right: Hand out fish, and people are fed for a day. Teach folks how to fish, and you've solved a bigger problem.
When a nation has been lost for 70 years to Communism - the greatest destroyer of wealth, decency, and the rule of law ever invented - handing the same old kleptocrats more money (even if they've obligingly changed their party labels) is like trying to refill a hot radiator without replacing the busted hose.
Standard policy at the International Monetar Fund has become embarrassingly simple: Loan money to thugs, whether ruthless or incompetent. See the thugs unable to repay their loans. Offer to give them a little longer, if only they'll raise taxes and initiate harsher ("more effective") collection methods. Wait to see which comes first: revolution or default. Either way, the U.S. taxpayers are left on the hook to make up the difference (where did one think most of those IMF funds came from?) while the bankers move on to anothersandbox.
If it's to persist, wealth must be created. Pour rice onto the docks of Somalia and North Korea as long as you like - the bellies will never be filled. Entrepreneurship and productivity must be nurtured by a reliable legal and financial system which guarantees that those who earn the wealth are allowed to keep it, or all is lost.
The best "foreign aid" we can provide such benighted lands are copies of our Declaration and Constitution, along with translations of Jefferson and Rand and Rothbard and John Stuart Mill.
Until they get that part right, all the wealth of America will never fill such a rat hole.
Nor should it.
Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His new book, "Send in the Waco Killers" is available at 1-800-244-2224.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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