Friday: Daniel McAdams writes:
Governmental funding of NGOs has been an increasingly effective tool for mobilizing popular support for governmental policies. A land or resource grab is hardly as compelling to the masses as a claimed human rights crisis when a foreign intervention is planned. Given this, it should be no surprise that the US government, through its own well-funded “democracy-promotion” NGO, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), is a major supporter of the International Federation for Human Rights. In fact, NED’s long-serving president, Carl Gershman, was one of the first signatories to Bouchuiguir’s Libya regime-change petition.
Saturday: Ryan McMaken writes:
Supporters of government largesse will often cite polls and studies showing the taxpayers support the expansion of this or that program. “Support” for a government program is all well and good when support only requires a nod of one’s head. It’s another matter entirely when one is asked to shell out actual money. Murray Rothbard knew this well, and he more than once suggested that the best way to determine just how much voters valued a certain government service was to stop taking funds by force and to allow taxpayers to voluntarily pay for government services.
