[specialist]

Sometimes "free" is too expensive.

Ask anyone who has gone aboard to do good works. There's a very fine line between helping and inadvertently creating a dependency or destroying previously stable social or economic structures.

Big example is famine relief. We dump our excess commodities in a local economy. That enriches the power elite. It nukes the local agriculture. People end up worse off.

[dllthomas]

My understanding is that it depends very much on the nature of the famine. Temporary famine caused by natural disaster or warfare can be helped quite a bit by temporary relief. Structural famine caused by ongoing problems is likely to be alleviated temporarily by temporary relief but the root causes deepened, creating the dependency you mention.

[rdwallis]

I don't find the argument that famine relief does more harm than good compelling.

Can you list some examples of this type of harm? Are they outliers or is it normal for this kind of aid to hurt its recipients?

[TDL]

I actually agree with you on this point. I was more reacting to the "White mans burden" comment.