There are two basic strands of thought bumping around the internets about what to do in the long run in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake. There are those who want to flood the country with aid and there are those backlashing who insist that aid has poured into the country for decades to little effect. The first camp has proponents ranging from naive optimists to educated experts while the second varies from reflexive cynics to an opposing camp of educated experts. Both sides have valid core points: resources and ingenuity can surmount just about any obstacle, but dumping pallet loads of dollar bills out the rears of C-130s never solved any problem.

The simple truth is that there are rich developed countries and there are poor undeveloped countries. 7.0 earthquakes in America do not generally result in a quarter million dead and three million homeless. And when a quake hits America, it doesn’t get aid from Haiti. It’s a question of resources on both counts. But simply excusing the devastation with a shrug, with the cynical answer that some countries are poor and some aren’t is unacceptable. That assumes that progress is impossible. A hundred years ago, an earthquake like the one that hit Haiti would have devastated even the most modern states. Look at San Francisco in 1906 or Tokyo in 1923.

Aid itself isn’t an answer. A third of Haiti’s annual government budget before the quake already came from foreign aid. Over the last two decades, over a thousand dollars of per capita foreign aid has poured into Haiti, a country with annual per capita income of less than $800. The problem isn’t a lack of money, it’s the lack of a plan.

The answer to the long term question has to involve self-sufficiency, so that the next quake that comes along can be handled by Haiti on its own. Put some of that $250 million of aid per year going to Haiti (not to mention some of the new influx) into figuring out a template for making Haiti a modern and stable state. America is already financially invested, so let’s make sure that there is a return on that investment. Teach a man to fish and all that.

(source for figures: Frum’s piece at CNN)