Private supranational organizations are agents of peace and prosperity. The Wellcome Trust, Oxfam, Coca-Cola, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, McDonalds, Google, Microsoft—all have furthered human progress in their own way. By contrast, supranational organizations run by or paid for by governments, regardless of their good intentions, have had a tendency to encourage socialism and tyranny, and to undermine national sovereignty, and with it, individual freedom.
United Nations
It is an institution allegedly dedicated to peace, freedom, and human rights, which includes Soviet Russia—the most brutal aggressor, the bloodiest dictatorship, the largest-scale mass-murderer and mass-enslaver in all history—among its charter members. Nothing can be added to that fact and nothing can mitigate it. It is so grotesquely evil an affront to reason, morality, and civilization that no further discussion is necessary, except for a glance at the consequences. The communist world has gained a moral sanction, a stamp of civilized respectability from the Western world—it has gained the West’s assistance in deceiving its victims—it has gained the status and prestige of an equal partner, thus establishing the notion that the difference between human rights and mass slaughter is merely a difference of political opinion.
—Ayn Rand. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966.
The United Nations is a forum for dictators, it serves to give them legitimacy and should be immediately shut down. It stands for nothing but compromise with evil. Governments that operate without the consent of their people are illegitimate and ought not be recognized except for the purposes of opening up free trade (which undermines despotism). It is disgraceful that the free countries of the world have tainted themselves by this association for so long.
It is disgraceful that the United States has played host to communists who bang their shoes on the table and threaten to bury the Free World for daring to resist their coercion. The air of the United States is too pure for tyrants to breathe. No government official from a non-democratic country should ever be allowed to step foot on United States soil, except to go on trial.
The Commonwealth of Nations
The Commonwealth gives dictators the opportunity to strut the world stage and rub shoulders with the likes of the British prime minister. It serves no real purpose other than to give legitimacy to tyrants who keep their countries grovelling in abject poverty and corruption. It should be disbanded immediately.
G8—G20
Prosperity comes not from grand conferences of economists but by countless acts of personal self-confidence and self-reliance.
—Margaret Thatcher. Speech to the Conservative Party conference, Brighton, October 10, 1980.
Coordinated economic policy is counterproductive. The rules of good government are clear and do not depend upon what other nations are doing. Even the need for free trade is independent of others’ actions. The meeting of so-called leaders at international summits insults their respective peoples. They are executive officers charged with applying laws. They have no business parading themselves to the world press and making farcical claims about how, through money tinkering, bailouts, and immoral socialism, they intend to bring prosperity to billions of mere mortals. Every one of those billions is an individual of equal status under the natural law to these pontificators. The prosperity of the world stems solely from them rising each morning and going to work.
The World Bank
The World Bank doles out money to tyrannies, thus encouraging the ongoing enslavement of the subject peoples, and to socialist countries, thus encouraging dependency and squalor. Humanity is resourceful; if given the proper legal infrastructure, all peoples will quickly flourish without the need for loans. A poor country needs a loan as much as an unemployed teenager needs one. If the Free World wants to help a poor country, the best way is through free trade. The need to immediately dismantle the World Bank is illustrated by the following news article:
A plan by the Chinese government to resettle 60,000 of its citizens in the historically Tibetan province of Dulan, using money supplied by the World Bank, is drawing fire from human rights activists. Over the opposition of the United States and Germany, the World Bank on Thursday approved the expenditure of $40 million for the relocation, which critics say is designed to further dilute the Tibetan population in Dulan.
For centuries, Dulan’s population was mostly ethnic Tibetan. But now, Tibetans are outnumbered by ethnic Chinese, and the relocation will further that trend because most of the people to be resettled are either ethnic Chinese or Muslim. The new Dulan settlers hail from Qinghai, an impoverished province deep in China’s interior that few outsiders visit. The idea behind the relocation, the government says, is to improve the economic prospects for people mired in poverty in Qinghai.
But such ethnic migrations are a hot topic for activists monitoring human rights in Tibet, which China invaded in 1959 and made into an official autonomous region in 1965 … . However, World Bank officials insist that none of the money earmarked for the Dulan resettlement will be spent until after an independent inspection.
“This is not a behind-closed-doors operation,” said Peter Stephens, a bank spokesman. “The whole purpose of doing this is to make sure that at every step from now on, as much information as exists is available.” China’s foreign ministry denounced the U.S. opposition to the resettlement plan, accusing the United States of using Tibet as a pretext to meddle in China’s internal affairs. (“World Bank’s financing of Tibet resettlement draws fire,” CNN, June 25, 1999.)
Tyrannies cannot claim sovereignty because they do not represent their people. They therefore cannot complain about “meddling in their internal affairs” any more than a murderer who has taken a family hostage can complain about invasion of his privacy when a SWAT team kicks in the door. Ethnic obliteration through dilution by an invader is a supreme evil. No amount of transparency can change that. Moreover the poverty of Qinghai is due to bad government and internal passports, not geography.
IMF
The IMF is a fund which provides money to countries in severe financial crisis. This is wrong because countries only come to such a pass if they are socialist. It is for the best that the people who voted for socialist governments should experience the consequences immediately. Temporarily shielding them from the consequences of their actions with money extorted from the taxpayers of other countries will only encourage profligacy in the future. It is like providing loans to bankrupts and spendthrifts when their credit runs out—it distorts their appreciation of their errors and so undermines their reform. By the time the country in question is weaned off the loans, its electorate has forgotten the actions that caused the collapse in the first place—they instead tend to think of their country as a hopeless economic basket case. The people become apathetic, convinced, as they are, of the hopelessness of any reform. The IMF should be immediately dismantled.
Bank for International Settlements
The Bank for International Settlements is not a bank for international settlements. The charter describes its mission as being to “foster cooperation among central banks and other agencies in pursuit of monetary and financial stability.” This is a fool’s quest. Central banks should not try to pursue monetary or financial stability because any actions to that end tend only to derange the market and cause credit booms and busts. The Bank should be dismantled immediately.
