20544: intervision2000: Steve Forbes on a fix for Haiti's woes (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: InterVision2000 <info@intervision2000.com>

Fact and Comment
Steve Forbes on  a fix for Haiti's woes
Forbes - 29 Mar 2004

How to Help Haiti Help Itself

The U.S. should take several important steps to give Haiti a chance to break
free from its history of tyranny, anarchy and perpetual poverty.

Tell the IMF to get lost, immediately. No representative of that agency
should be allowed near Port-au-Prince. The IMF has done immeasurable harm to
developing countries around the world, and Haiti has been a particularly
hard-hit victim.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Haiti's economy began to blossom. Foreign
investment started flowing in. Textile factories and other businesses were
opened. More and more people were getting decent-paying jobs (by Haitian
standards), which enabled them to begin pulling themselves up the economic
ladder. But the IMF plied its poisonous brew of budgetary austerity, higher
taxes and debasement of the currency, particularly after Jean-Bertrand
Aristide was restored to power in 1994.

The economic boom collapsed; inflation ensued. We should tell Haiti's new
interim government that past debts will be forgiven if basic economic
reforms are put in place.

Haiti should enact a flat income tax, somewhere in the range of 10% to 15%.
The threshold for being liable for this levy should be set high enough to
exclude most of the working population. A similar tax regime should be put
in place for businesses. Haiti's economy would quickly flourish, and tax
revenues would blossom.

To prevent politicians from plundering people via inflation, Haiti should
make the U.S. dollar its legal tender, as several other countries, such as
Panama, Ecuador and El Salvador, have done.

The government should also make it easy for people to set up businesses:

Fill out a simple form, and pay a $1 or $2 fee. Like most poor countries,
Haiti has made it extremely difficult for entrepreneurs and merchants to
start businesses that operate within the law.

Washington should also encourage Haiti to institute a formal, inclusive
property rights system. This would turn the majority of that country's
squatters into legal property owners, who would have the rights and
protections that we in the U.S. and other Western nations take for granted.
Remember that, historically, much of U.S. property law basically codified
what people were already doing, i.e., it turned American "squatters" into
"pioneers."

Haiti doesn't lack for entrepreneurial energy, as the vibrant and
increasingly prosperous Haitian community in the U.S. attests. The country,
though, badly needs institutions, monetary/tax laws and arrangements that
will enable these entrepreneurial impulses to find a productive outlet at
home.

It is profoundly in our interest--and obviously in Haiti's--that these
changes come to pass. As businesses proliferate and incomes begin to rise,
an emerging middle class will develop the civil customs and institutions
that make a country less likely to fall into the grip of kleptomaniacal
thugs. The nation can then finally achieve a destiny worthy of its heroic
overthrow of its French slave masters and its dramatic defeat of Napoleon's
troops two centuries ago.

Steve Forbes
(c) 2004 Forbes Inc.
By Steve Forbes, Forbes