Over the last 50 years the wealthy countries of the West have given over $50 trillion--that’s right, trillion--in aid to poor countries in Latin America, Asia, and, especially, Africa. And, as William Easterly demonstrates from official statistics in The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, there is actually a negative correlation between aid received and economic progress.

Official development aid (ODA) slows progress, for a variety of reasons. Two of the most important are that it props up corrupt regimes and perpetuates a sense of helplessness in the people. The vast majority of official development aid never reaches the poor in these countries. It gets consumed by bureaucrats and, all too often, by the those who masquerade as heads of state. Much of it winds up in their Swiss bank accounts--ready to provide them a cushy golden parachute should some other thug manage to push them out of power.

This is why Harvard- and Oxford-educated Zambian economist and World Bank consultant Dambisa Moyo argues in Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa that all ODA should end--completely. Indeed, even much private, philanthropic aid is destructive--even, sadly enough, when it’s given by religious organizations, directly to the poor rather than to governments, a case made well by Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett in When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Ourselves.

But never expect a bleeding-heart liberal, much less one who, like President Barack Obama, sees himself as God’s gift to save the world, to understand these things. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton--who sees herself about the same way Obama sees himself but has been relegated to second fiddle--emphasized, in announcing in a press conference at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen today that the U.S. would take the lead in raising $100 billion per year to transfer to poor countries, that the aid would go to “the poorest and most vulnerable among us.”

Hogwash. ODA never goes to the poor. It goes from government to government. It may go from government of a rich country to government of a poor country, but it never goes to the poor themselves. Instead, in the corrupt governments that dominate the Third World, ODA invariably goes from government to corrupt leaders and bureaucrats.