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Okay, here we go. So you guys wanted to know the President Trump, Secretary Rubio and even Elon Musk effect on Haiti. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. Here we go. So I, I can feel the controversy brewing and I'm, I'm really nervous because I know at least a portion of you out there loathe President Trump and I'm not going to change that today. I do hope that you'll have an open mind and an open heart to consider that on the subject of Haiti, the position of this administration might be helpful. And so I, with that spirit, I hope you'll listen to a few things. Now we, we're going to speculate wildly on the position of the administration only because it's so early. Right. We're not even, it's February 18th, 19th today. And so we're not even a month into President Trump's administration. Secretary Rubio has only been appointed or approved for maybe two and a half weeks. We're just getting started. But there have been some clear signals and I think we can speculate, speculate on their approach to Haiti on a few things. And so we're just going to talk about the long term today because that will be related to humanitarian aid and economic development in Haiti. The more near term things we'll handle next week, which is more related to security and governance. Right. How, how are they going to impact those very pressing issues? That should be a robust discussion. But for right now, we'll, we'll conquer the more enduring issue, which is the principles that they will likely be deploying around humanitarian aid and economic development. If you recall, in our previous episode, we talked about how the position that the United States and the international community at large takes on Haiti from an economic development and humanitarian aid aspect are absolutely critical to the long term demise of Haiti or in this case, looking forward, hopefully the, the long term benefit or progress for Haiti. You know, we talked at length about how lazy giving in Haiti from not just the government, foreign governments, but also from NGOs for years and years have created an overpopulation so inorganically driven up the population at a faster rate than the economy could grow to support it. Economy has grown. It's done very well considering it, what it's been stacked up against, except for the last couple of years where Haiti crossed that threshold of terrible where now even the economy can't grow. It's, it's shrinking year over year because of the security situation. Right. We talked about a little bit about how scarcity that comes from overpopulation creates the survival of the fittest where environment where the, the guys with the biggest guns take over. And that's what's happening. So that's the situation we're at right now. And so, and so let's talk about just briefly what President Trump and Secretary Rubio and, and in some ways Elon Musk have already done to Haiti, so to speak. So just a quick breakdown of what kind of budgets we're talking about. So USAID is around $40 billion a year, which sounds like a big chunk, which of course it is, but it's only about a half of a percent of the national budget annually. And then Haiti humanitarian portion of that is about $40 million a year of 230 or so million in broader foreign aid that the US contributes to Haiti. So remember, foreign aid is, it can be everything from bullets and vehicles, economic development and then of course humanitarian aid. So food and medicine, health care, that kind of thing. So I just wanted you to get a sense of scale on what we're talking about here. So we're talking about tens of millions of dollars, but not billions of dollars. And so the, the vast majority of those millions of dollars have been frozen for now by Secretary Rubio. Some of the more emergency related dollars have been, have continued to flow. That's in support of the security support mission that's in place right now. And then also some of the emergency aid as well, from what we can tell. So that, that's the current state. So is that bad for Haiti or is that good for Haiti? Let's, let's presume from the signals that we're seeing now there will at least be a dramatic curtailing of humanitarian aid from the US To Haiti. So is that bad or is that good? In order to answer that question, let's back up quite a bit. So we talked about how lazy giving is actually a big part of the problem in Haiti long term. And so should we just stop doing humanitarian aid in Haiti? You know, the population in Haiti has been driven up for decades because of excess humanitarian aid. So shouldn't we just stop it altogether? Well, that, that's a particularly callous approach to say that all those people, those real individuals whose faces I know should all just die because they're part of this overpopulation thing and we need to correct the population. There's a particularly heinous Malthusian perspective that states that, well, we've driven up the population so much in Haiti over the past decades through over use of humanitarian aid that we should just Stop and let that population correct itself. And you can, you can hear the voice of Thanos from the the Avengers series in that sort of perspective. It, to me, it's, it's absolutely abhorrent to suggest that we should just cut it off. Right? And you can, you can imagine there is a right and a wrong way to do everything. We can think back to Afghanistan where we pulled out of Afghanistan. And, and it was pretty undebatable that we should pull out of Afghanistan. It's the way that we pulled out of Afghanistan that became tragic. And the same thing can be true here in Haiti. And, and so there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. It's tough to argue that humanitarian aid being done in the way that it has been done for decades should continue, because it should not. And then let's also acknowledge the distinction between emergency humanitarian aid and maintenance humanitarian aid, right, the difference between someone who is starving versus hungry, right? Those are two different sets of ethics rules. So from here on out, we're going to just be talking about those who are hungry, not starving, both literally and figuratively. So how do we help those people long term? How do we do power giving? How do we do, how do we do good humanitarian aid? Let's talk about that. So in order to, to discuss that properly, you gotta back way up to first principles. So let's talk about what an economy is to begin with. So I often like to think of an economy in its most basic form. So I, I talk about this deserted island, right? So imagine that you're on a deserted island with, let's say, a hundred other people, and you know you're going to be there for a very long time. And so you want to get organized and you divide up the land into a hundred different pieces. And every piece of the land on the island is a little bit different. Some are conducive to farms, some have little streams on them. Others are, are conducive to maybe mining. And some have mango trees on it. And that's everybody's favorite thing, for obvious reasons, because mangoes are amazing. And the whole economy begins to kind of point itself toward the magic mango trees, right? And so that's, that's a structural direction. Economists will call that economic structure a structural direction for the island. It's the key resource on the island is, is mangoes, probably a carry mango, which is what I have in my backyard. They're delicious. So the, the island gets, gets moving in this direction. All the trade relationships get set up. You get specialization in Trade, you get a division of labor and all. All these economic relationships set up in order to optimize production. And then eventually you get services. Right? It gets people who aren't directly producing anything, but they're making life better or easier or more efficient. For those who are producing, maybe there's a little bank that, that sets up and there's some sort of little fiat currency. There's. Call them sand dollars, right. And that becomes your. Your currency that they trade with whatever you get. This basic economy, all of that economy is set up to be productive. And the way that everyone on the island is making economic decisions or decisions around what they will do with their activities is based on avoiding pain and gaining pleasure. They try to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and they. They make their best guess on how to spend their time based on that. This is the basics of an economy and how it moves forward. Okay, so how do you stimulate an economy? How do you get it going faster than it is naturally or organically going to go? So to do that, to get somebody moving or a group of somebody's moving, you have to decrease the degree of difficulty for them to go and get something or, or go begin to produce something. I like to think of some of the villages in Haiti where I've worked to illustrate this idea of stimulus. So there's. There's a village that I did some work in where the men there were eating about every third day. They would usually eat on the same days that they could find work, and that could be on a neighboring. They're all subsistence farmers, but they would leave the village to go work on maybe somebody else's larger farm or doing some other form of labor. Some would travel quite a distance to do that, and they would typically eat on those days. And then when they were home, they would just sit around and conserve energy. And so you can imagine in. In a. A life like that, you make very concerted choices, very. You think long and hard about how you're going to spend your energy. You're not being lazy, You're. You're being efficient. In this particular village, they really wanted a road to come into their village from the outside. There are pretty mountainous areas of the road. There's going to be a lot of hacking through rock. And so it's a. It's a difficult road. There's a reason why it had never existed there before in history. Right. But they believed that that could unlock some of their economy for a number of reasons. Ease. Ease of getting things in and out of the town and bringing new Business in, and this is a couple hundred people in this village. They really wanted a road, but nobody was going to do it. Why? Because it was too difficult. It would cost too much capital, right? That'll be a generic term that we'll use in economics. Capital is, is value in this guy's world. In these villagers world, that capital was likely food and, and energy and tools. And all of that would be calculated cost. In their mind, I can't make the road because it's too hard, the pain is too great, and the pleasure is not enough. Right. And so in their mind, that equation didn't work out. The cost did not exceed the benefit or perceived the benefit of making this road. And then somehow, by mostly chance, we gave these guys, I want to say initially, about six, six or eight pickaxes. I forget how we. We kind of stumbled on it, but somehow we gave those to them as a gift. And within months they had built the road themselves with pickaxes and shovels, mostly pickaxes. And this is, you know, people with rocks on their head, men, women and children building this road. About 200 people building this road for months. These are people that eat every third day, right? And of course, as soon as we caught wind that they were doing this, we tried to assist them. Remember, some of those pickaxes got worn all the way down to the nub and they were still using them. So we learned of that, we got them some new ones, right? This, this act of decreasing the degree of difficulty for someone to do a productive activity that is economic stimulus. We, we injected a form of capital. And capital can be actual dollars, it can be tools, it can be knowledge or technology. There's a lot of ways to infuse this kind of value or capital into an economy and thus stimulate it, right? Get it going and, and allow them to start producing. Of course, this added all kinds of value to this village. So that's, that's a fun little success story. But more importantly, it illustrates this principle of stimulus. It also illustrates another really important principle, something that my wife call gnbo. Give nothing but opportunity. When you give, like Santa Claus, you usually end up doing what we talked about in the last episode. It can create these strange economic dynamics like what actually exists in Haiti because of all the giving. For so long as we talked about that deserted island where the whole economy was focused on the mango trees, because that was the coolest, most valuable thing that people could focus on. And that created more production of mangoes and everything else. That's a real productive activity that's a real economic activity in Haiti because so much foreign aid has been coming in for so long and that's such a highly coveted economic activity. Many of the young people that I know are building their careers around servicing these foreign entities, whether it be USAID or NGOs or some other foreign entity, because that is the lowest cost, highest benefit economic activity they can conceive of. Right. And they're, and they're right historically because so much free money has, has flowed into the country. And so that creates a non productive economic structure so that their island is pointed at the wrong thing. Instead of pointing at the quote unquote mango tree, they're pointed off the island to perform a service for something that it's not productive. If you're just building your economy about getting a handout that's not producing anything. Right. You can see how that's, that's just cyclical. Right. It's, it's a dependency, it's not productive. Now luckily, because Haitians are smart, they have taken many of those handouts and done truly economically productive things with those handouts. And so luckily we've had economic growth for, for all of those decades, just not as fast as the population has been going up because of the handout. Okay, so let's talk about self reliance. Work a little bit. So we've talked about lazy giving. What's power? Giving power Giving is giving self reliance. What does that even mean? It's, it's challenging. So you're essentially trying to spot what we did in that village that I told you about. You're trying to find an opportunity that you can provide to an individual or a family or a community or a country that will spur productive economic activity. So there's something that they ought to be doing that is productive and conducive to their environment, their land, their economic situation that they should be doing. It would be productive. It would be helpful to them and to others. It creates value. You have to obtain the knowledge necessary to know what that is. And then for whatever reason they're not doing it. It's usually because there's some sort of obstacle, the cost that's greater than their perceived benefit. And you can reduce that cost somehow. Maybe you're reducing the risk, maybe you're increasing the capital or their ability to do it. So think about back to our village and the pickaxes. Why couldn't they have just bought pickaxes? Well, consider someone who is so poor that they only eat every third day. The likelihood of them saving up enough money to Buy a pickaxe and not only one, but a lot of pickaxes. And so much that they're able to get the whole community involved and motivated in, in doing this construction project. Like that's, that, that's a pretty heavy lift, right? They need to be confident that they can actually achieve it. And so in order to reduce the perceived cost or the actual cost of doing this productive activity, we had to give them these pickaxes. Right. So they didn't have to spend a year or two saving up the money to buy this pickaxe, this one pickaxe, and then by the way, coordinate everybody else to save up their money and buy these pickaxes. It's to them an insurmountable hurdle to get six pickaxes. Okay, so that was us giving an opportunity. GMBO give nothing but opportunity. We gave the opportunity in order to increase their likelihood of self reliance. So, so they get the pickaxes, they make the road, the road opens up more economic activity that for these guys hopefully will result in more water for the town and thus more trees. And you can see where this is, is going, that that is economic stimulus and self reliance. Great. So how do you do that at scale? How do you do that for a whole country? And now we're getting into the challenge of why USAID is not doing this, has not done it, and won't ever do this. It's hard. It's really hard work. It's not to say that everyone at USAID is villains, although there certainly are villains there, meaning people who are corrupt and guilty of fraud, waste and abuse. That certainly exists. That certainly exists in Haiti, meaning the recipients of those funds being guilty of fraud, waste and abuse. Of course that happens. And so they're going to be unable to be effective at giving self reliance or power giving for that reason. But there's also some other reasons that I think are important and less understood. There's this notion of central planning. As a lot of development commentators mention this central planning. It's essentially the idea that the people at the top of these big organizations, I'll keep saying usaid, not that they're the only villain, but easy one to pick on right now. It's this idea that the people at the top are the only ones who know what to do. They're the only ones who know how to solve the issues that you're facing. And so they're going to come up with this plan on how you're going to address your issues. They're going to give you the plan and Then the country is going to do your plan. And you know, you can hear it in my voice that, that, that's ridiculous. What I didn't tell you about the pickaxes story is I had done several other things in that village that were total waste of time, that were my ideas, right, That I thought would work, that I essentially shoved down their throat. Had I just done the hard work of listening and truly understanding their plight, I, I would have discovered the pickaxes, right? I would have discovered the true stimulus, what they really needed in that village, right? That's, that's the risk of central planning or top down planning. What you need is a distributed decision making or bottom up planning, right? And that's a hard thing for any organization to do. Not alert. All organizations are built for that or can be built for that, right? Sometimes autocracy is super valuable. You need one decision maker and everybody below to follow. Think the military, right? You're on the battlefield, there's no time for chatting about what we should do. We need to assault the objective and you need to act like robots to some degree and get the job done like your commanding officer told you to. That's autocracy. And some environments call for that. But other organizations, like in humanitarian aid, you can't do it that way because lives are complicated and worlds are complicated, countries are complicated and they're incredibly difficult to understand. Every situation to the level where you can discover the figurative pickaxes, right? Those true economic stimuli that produce self reliance. So remember, our fundamental question is what will the Trump Rubio effect be on Haiti if we can avoid the trap of thinking my tax dollars were given to my federal government and their job is to go be the, the generous benefactors on my behalf to countries around the world. If we can change that thinking and instead take my own dollars, hopefully with a lower tax burden and take those dollars and now I get to be the giver. I get the opportunity to be generous. I get the opportunity to be a power giver who thinks deeply about the way that I give to a foreign nation, for example, Haiti. If that's what happens, then the Trump Rubio effect on Haiti will be spectacular because we'll stop getting all this lazy giving that just perpetuates the problem at best, kicks it down the curb, at worst, exacerbates it over time, creating greater scarcity, greater lawlessness, greater terror from these gangs. Through the dynamics that we've discussed, hopefully at length at this point, that Trump Rubio effect could be spectacular for Haiti that has yet to be Seen, because that means that you and I have to pick up that baton and run with it in a smart way that cranks up the dial. I'm giving that doesn't just outsource it to everyone else. The hard work of power giving is a distributed activity. It means many smart people need to hit the ground and do the hard listening and understanding and technical assessment of each environment, each individual, family, community, country. I know that it's fun to be Santa Claus. I know that it's incredibly satisfying to go down to Haiti or anywhere else and hand out free food. I've done it right. It's, it is incredibly satisfying work. But if you are doing that for hungry people rather than starving people, then you're just perpetuating the problem. That is a heartbreaking realization. But that's the hard work of doing self reliance. You know, as I was serving as bishop for the last few years for my church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints here in South Florida, one of my jobs is to administrate the welfare program. We have our own welfare program and it's absolutely built on self reliance. I'm highly discouraged from paying, you know, a $50 phone bill because you ran out of cash this month and highly encouraged to do a thorough self reliance assessment where I get a male and female leader from the congregation that goes and digs into your world. They literally go through your cupboards to make sure that you have food and things that you need. They go through your finances, you bring out your receipts and your bills and they do an entire assessment to figure out how did you get in this situation and what's it going to take to get you out of it. And they use as much of their talent and experience and love in order to get into the nitty gritty of this person's life. And sometimes they the solution. Not sometimes. Typically the solution to that person's self reliance is painful. They don't want to do it. That's why they got into the situation they're in. Could be knowledge that they need to obtain, training that they need to obtain. Could be an expense they need paid, maybe for some education or a certificate. Or could be us getting them out of the apartment or home that they're in into something they can afford. It's always something inconvenient and difficult. But a talented and caring servant or servants that go into their life and do the work, the hard work of listening and looking to figure out how to get this person more self reliant, that is the love that is the love and care that that it takes to do God's work on any continent. You must care enough to do the hard work to dig in and research and truly understand and listen and watch as best you can what is actually needed to produce self reliance, that freedom of living independently. And then you have to be competent enough to understand from a technical standpoint what's actually needed and then care enough to provide that thing. And that's just not something that USAID or any other government entity is is going to be good at. That's what you and I need to do. That's what NGOs need to do. Hopefully small NGOs right to allow for that distributed model where you get a lot of smart people on the ground listening in small ways. And it's not just NGOs, it's also private investors. We want investors going down to Haiti who are understanding the business environment. We want the diaspora from around the world to be able to go into Haiti and really crank up the dial on these self reliance focused investments. There will be a role for government in helping Haiti, but it'll be much smaller than you think. There will be the occasional infrastructure project that will actually help the economy and be productive that you can assist with. But it's the exception, not the rule. The rule is this distributed model of detecting self reliance opportunities where you can give nothing but opportunity. Okay, so here's the part that this is going to go viral. So what is going to be the Trump Rubio effect on Haiti? Well, if it means that the fraud, waste and abuse and corruption of USAID and other government activities in Haiti stop and you and I start giving to Haiti in a way that produces self reliance that give nothing but opportunity method that we've talked about at length on this podcast. If that's what happens, then it'll be a spectacular impact on Haiti for years and years to come and we'll finally achieve that independence that we want for Haitians. But that's up to you and I. Will we step in and be the ones that do the power giving? Will we be the ones that do the hard work of understanding the plight of the individual Haitian, Haitian family, the Haitian communities and the country at large and do the heavy lifting, the hard work ourselves and stop pawning that off to our government. Will we do that? I guess that's up to you and I tune in to the next episode when we're going to talk about the near term Trump Rubio effect. So that's going to be related to security and good governance or politics in Haiti. That's going to be an exciting one. So look forward to talking to you next week. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Stimpak Podcast, Season three. Will you please subscribe, rate, review and share it with your friends and colleagues? Thank you for your help. This podcast has been brought to you by stimpak incorporated. Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.