Friday, May 11, 2007

Yank the Bank

George Will absolutely blasts the World Bank in his latest column. Will is dead right. We don't need the World Bank. On top of the billions of dollars in waste and corruption, private capital markets are much more efficient.

From Will's column:

The kerfuffle over whether Paul Wolfowitz, the World Bank's president, behaved badly regarding the contract for his companion to facilitate her departure from the bank involves no large issue. The bank's existence does. The bank's rationale, never strong, has evaporated.

Born in 1944, at the apogee of confidence in governments and international governmental organizations, the bank's mission is ''to fight poverty with passion and professionalism.'' The great prerequisite for curing poverty is, however, economic growth, and the world has learned, during a 63-year retreat from statism, that the prerequisite for growth is free markets allocating private capital to efficient uses...