When people who earn more than the average have their 'surplus', or the greater part of it, seized from them in taxes, and when people who earn less than average have the deficiency , or the greater part of it, turned over to them in hand-outs and doles, the production of all must sharply decline; for the energetic and able who lose their incentive to produce more than the average, and the slothful and unskilled lose their incentive to improve their condition.

Government-to-government foreign aid promotes statism, centralized planning, socialism, dependence, pauperization, inefficiency, and waste. It prolongs the poverty it is designed to cure. Voluntary private investment in private enterprise, on the other hand, promotes capitalism, production, independence, and self-reliance.

The first (lesson) which we meet again and again in history, is that once the dole or similar relief programs are introduced, they seem almost inevitably - unless surrounded by the most rigid restrictions - to get out of hand. The second lesson is that once this happens the poor become more numerous and worse off than they were before, not only because they have lost self-reliance, but because the sources of wealth and production on which they depend for either doles or jobs are diminished or destroyed.

In a free enterprise system, with an honest and stable money, there is dominantly a close link between effort and productivity, on the one hand, and economic reward on the other. Inflation severs this link. Reward comes to depend less and less on effort and production, and more and more on successful gambling and luck.