Ayn Rand’s Distinctive Analysis of America’s Foreign Aid

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been at the center of the national debate. The Trump administration seeks to cut its funding, calling it a wasteful bureaucracy that does not benefit American interests abroad, while critics warn that withholding aid will weaken U.S. influence and betray America’s duty to help the less fortunate. But what if both proponents and opponents of foreign aid operate under mistaken assumptions — and have been doing so for decades?

Revisiting Ayn Rand’s 1962 essay “The Pull Peddlers” offers a distinctively philosophical perspective on foreign aid that sheds light on today’s debate.

Rand identified two broad camps of arguments in favor of foreign aid, often appearing simultaneously: the “idealistic” argument, appealing to altruism to justify America’s alleged duty to support poor nations, and the “practical” argument, claiming aid serves U.S. interests to prevent certain countries from becoming threats. These are the same rationalizations being offered today.

But Rand claims that they are contradictory arguments:

[E]ither the “under-developed” nations are so weak that they are doomed without our help, in which case they cannot become a threat to us — or they are so strong that with some other assistance they can develop to the point of endangering us, in which case we should not drain our economic power to help the growth of potential enemies who are that powerful.

At the core of Rand’s philosophical critique of foreign aid is her challenge to the notion that justifies it: “the public interest.” She claims it is an undefinable notion that pits interest groups against one another. She argues that, since there is no such entity as “the public” but only individuals, then “the idea that ‘the public interest’ supersedes private interests and rights, can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.”

In “The Pull Peddlers,” Rand challenges the very foundations and morality of the foreign aid debate. To see how she skewers its many rationalizations and what she thinks those rationalizations hide, read the whole essay here.