Jane Galt writes in Trust in oil? about some foreseeable problems with the idea of an oil trust for Iraq. Fair enough: we certainly couldn't expect perfection to spontaneously emerge, and the more problems anticipated, the better the designed solutions can be.
But she and the libertarian repondants miss the big point: who's getting the oil money now? Is the current distribution of oil profits and revenues anywhere near as good for the Iraqi people as even a flawed oil trust would be?
It would be nice if she had included a link to the original post.
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Even at the cost of massive corruption, getting the equivalent of a few more dollars' purchasing power from a national oil trust into the hands of ordinary Iraqis could go a long way towards settling down the country. After all, Muhammad Yunus's libertarian fans claim he worked miracles in Bangladesh by lending out the equivalent of Americans' pocket change -- though after Yunus' 30 years of micro-lending, Bangladesh still has a per capita GDP of about $400 a year, according to NationMaster.com. (Some "miracle"!) An annual per capita grant of similar amounts of money in Iraq couldn't make things worse than they look now.
It's not an un-libertarian idea, given the multiple and diverse strains of libertarian philosophy.
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