This selection is available as a downloadable or streaming audio podcast at the Voice of Liberty Podcast Network, Week 5.

If you're active at all on the Internet, you've likely received an email or seen an ad or some other type of tease directing you to get involved with the game/international aid program called 'Free Rice'.  Free Rice is said to be the brainchild of John Breen, a 50 something computer programmer and is already wildly successful. At the website, visitors play an English vocabulary game.  Getting the right answer means 20 grains of rice are donated to starving nations as food aid.

How successful is it?  On the site's very first day, October 11, 2007, just 830 grains of rice were donated.  Six weeks later on November 30, 2007, according to the site, a staggering 372,369,680 grains were donated.  Such is the power of the web, bloggers, email and the other viral methods of marketing used to promote the idea.

Unfortunately, as delightful as this sounds the reality is that all this effort will likely amount to little more than giving players a false impression they've done something effective to combat world hunger.  For the people supposed to benefit from all this largesse, little will actually change and things will likely get worse.  Free Rice is simply the latest in a decades old collection of failed programs designed to help the starving.  Little effort is needed to determine that this program, like so many of those before it, involves the United Nations.

Free Rice's sister site is Poverty.com.  Poverty.com displays a list of 22 countries which agreed to contribute a percentage of their Gross National Income to international aid.  This would raise $195 billion per year.  From the website you get the impression this was a recent pledge.  It talks about conferences and summits from 2000 to 2002 where the world's nations, via the UN, pledge this aid to combat world hunger.  In reality, that pledge was first made in the UN in 1970. Since then, UN member nations have donated trillions of dollars and yet world hunger is the same or worse as when this program was initially agreed upon.  The problem involves the same nations and parts of the world.  35 years of effort and no success to report.

The UN has been an abysmal failure at almost everything it has undertaken.  International aggression in the Middle East?  Humanitarian crises like tsunamis?  Purely UN based programs like the Oil-for-Food program/scandal in Iraq?  Take your pick.  The UN is corrupt, ineffective, bloated and inefficient.  Why should  we get involved with another UN boondoggle?

Free Rice offers a way for people to feel good while actually doing nothing of substance to fix the problem.  Individuals aren't even asked to contribute a single penny of their own money.  Free Rice displays advertising from corporations and so it is ad dollars that pay for this.  The UN gets its cut, of course.  Administrative oversight and other international low speed/high drag twaddle.

But there's a more important reason to dislike the program.  Bottom line?  Not only is its administration problematic, it makes the problem worse!

As far back as 1988 The Heritage Foundation documents objections to programs like this.  Beyond the corruption, the diversion of food to other groups and areas, and the myriad other obstacles programs like Free Rice must overcome, the problem is their goal is to end hunger.  However, except in cases of disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis, hunger is merely a symptom of the real problem, poverty.  Flooding the markets of starving countries with free food prevents those markets and agriculture infrastructure from making money and developing adequate and modern infrastructure to ensure they'll be able to fed themselves in the future.  When the infrastructure either fails to develop or erodes further it guarantees there will be both poverty and hunger to spare next year.

Better we take the money from our companies and governments and build real pipelines for irrigation and rail, road and air hubs for shipment and exchanges for fair market trades.  These practical and proven infrastructure improvements would do more to feed the hungry than all the grains of rice we can donate by knowing what “dystopia” means.  Of course that would mean implementing democracy, capitalism and the rest of the nasty, detestable characteristics of the US and other First World nations.  I doubt that will go over big with either the despots and dictators ruling these countries or their compatriots at the UN who talk a nice talk in the arena of assistance but fail to walk any walk at all when it comes to practically changing the reality on the ground.

So - if you want to improve your vocabulary, spend some of your own money on a thesaurus.  If you really want to help starving people, you've a better chance at doing that by sending a check directly to Haliburton than by taking part in any program involving the UN.  Should we help set these suffering people free?  Absolutely.  But Free Rice isn't the way to get the job done.

Thinking the truth of the premise that 'There's no such thing as a free lunch' wins another round ...

Blue Collar Muse