Idealism

Matthew Yglesias notes, as he often has before, how much cheaper than the Iraq War various humanitarian measures would be. Even apart from the Iraq analogy, I'd like to see a lot of this get done. The biggest obstacles, however, are political. Not only do most of these not have an important lobbying group, but as Dave Milovich has pointed out to me in the past, Americans vastly overestimate the cost of foreign aid expenditures. Most of this stuff is insignificant in terms of our federal budget, but it sounds like a big deal, and one people perceive as going down a black hole because the problems have existed so long, in part because of the inaction by the powers that could deal with them, causing an ongoing cycle.