Back in early 2009, the Center for Freedom and Prosperity released this video to explain the universal recipe for growth and prosperity.
The core message, if you want to skip the six-minute video, is that nations will become richer if they have a good mix of these five ingredients.
I’m recycling the video today because it is a perfect introduction to a superb column in the Wall Street Journal by Mary Anastasia O’Grady.
She explains that there’s little hope of solving the border crisis if foreign governments continue to impose bad policies that impoverish their citizens.
The right thing to do about the migration crisis is to return to a U.S.-led pro-growth agenda for the Western Hemisphere. …Open markets, sound money, light tax and regulatory policies and the rule of law were once standard U.S. advice for the neighbors. Today both Democrats and Republicans are protectionist. That’s bad enough. But the priorities of America’s far left have become top foreign-policy priorities for the Biden State Department and White House: LGBT initiatives, income equality, labor activism and the end of fossil fuels. Profit is a dirty word. …bidenista hostility toward capitalism everywhere. …it will be tough to hold back the human tsunami crashing on U.S. shores. Economic freedom and development are the only humane solutions to the poverty driving these huddled masses. …The Washington Consensus was…a blueprint for fiscal discipline, privatization, tax reform, deregulation and trade and investment liberalization. …its remedies bore fruit. …neither protectionism nor the antidevelopment ideology of socialism is cost-free. The hardship hitting all sides in the migrant crisis is the high price of getting the economics of development wrong.
The moral of the story is that the developing world needs free markets and limited government. That will mitigate the flow of illegals since there’s not a lot of emigration from nations that become prosperous.
Sadly, the usual knee-jerk response from Washington is foreign aid. But that approach is either wasteful or counterproductive.
P.S. Regular readers won’t be surprised to learn that the OECD and IMF are trying to further impoverish Latin American countries.
