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(or their various permutations), where any period of stability merely serves as preparation for the next "reform."

Nowhere is this more evident than in Central and South America, where over the past five years there has been a significant backlash against free market reforms. As noted, much of this may have been the result of well-intentioned, but misdirected efforts on the part of the United States. American foreign aid may have helped to pave the way for many of the Marxist revolutions and expropriations of privately owned enterprises that occurred throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America since World War II, and the misdirected efforts to reorient the economies along more free market lines.

Handouts by themselves do not deliver justice, nor do they create a more just social order. Because the underlying corrupt system remains in place without any power going to ordinary people, the influx of foreign development funds usually increased the already-wide gap between the rich and the poor. This only succeeded in alienating the people such efforts were intended to help. It also magnified the obvious difference between the rich and the poor: that the rich derive their incomes from the ownership of capital, while the poor lack effective access to capital ownership.

Handouts and the subsequent disparities between the rich and the poor created the perfect political and social conditions for a return to socialism. Like military aid, foreign aid that does not reform the basic flaws in the system is at best a temporary expedient. It may be useful for buying time to attack the social and economic causes that lead to revolution, but by itself does nothing to restructure the system. By not providing the poor in Latin America with the means to become partners in free enterprise growth, the United States wasted resources and lives to no good purpose.

Unless the assumptions and basic approach underlying American foreign policy in Central and South America are changed, the ordinary people of Latin America can only expect more of the same. Socialism at least has the advantage of making most people equally miserable, the ugly vice of envy keeping the extravagances of the powerful under wraps or at least under control.

There is, however, hope. In 1986 the broadly bipartisan Presidential Task Force on Project Economic Justice appointed by President Reagan detailed a proposal to deliver justice to the people of the Caribbean and Central America by sponsoring a program of widespread

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