The Teach Freedom Blog

James Shikwati: "Please Stop the Aid!"

Our friend James Shikwati, founder of IREN Kenya, is interviewed in Germany's  Der Spiegel.  Here's the link to the English site, where the interview begins:

SPIEGEL: Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa...

Shikwati: ... for God's sake, please just stop.

SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

Read the whole thing...

Canada's Limited Government Heritage

Michel-Kelly Gagnon, president of the TFA-winning Montreal Economic Institute, had an excellent piece in yesterday's Financial Post titled: "Our free-market past - Forget the notion of Canadian history as a long succession of government interventions. Private initiatives and individual liberties forged this country."

Horray for Bollywood

Alex has an op-ed in The Washington Examiner today, about the Bollywood film industry and how India's Centre for Civil Society developed a documentary filmmaker's competition to expose "livelihood problems," explained in this quote below: 

India's bloated public service, unfortunately, is notorious for its restrictive labor covenants and the attendant red tape. If there's a way to make it difficult for people to earn a living, its bureaucrats know how to do it and have perfected it to an art.

That is why [CCS's] documentary competition (or "Jeevika") is so important. It will help expose the games Indian politicians play with the job market, games that perpetuate poverty.

Welcome to Atlas's Teach Freedom Blog

Since 1981, Atlas has been working to strengthen the freedom movement by assisting independent public policy institutes ("think tanks), which we believe can be a very cost-effective means for changing the climate of opinion in the direction of greater liberty.    Atlas's concentration on think tanks is in part due to the difficulty that classical liberals have faced in academia over the years.   

But we remain optimistic that bridges can be built between think tanks and universities.   Indeed, some of Atlas's more innovative programs over the years (see here and here) directly focus on bringing the ideas of freedom to universities and recognizing important scholars within university settings.   This blog allows Atlas senior staff, including great minds like Leonard Liggio and Alex Chafuen, to share their ideas and knowledge with a wider audience.  We hope friends from the think tank and academic communities will find it of interest.

We also remain attentive to how new technologies are shaping the climate of ideas.   The blogosphere has become a wonderful low-cost medium for the free exchange of ideas.    The launch of this Teach Freedom blog is accompanied by the development of a new tool -- the Atlas Blog Hub -- which collects content from blogs from all over the world.   It's our hope these tools will help continue (and accelerate) the spread of ideas that can create freedom, peace and prosperity all over the globe.