The latest issue of Commentary features Joshua Muravchik’s critique of the United Nations. While it’s no surprise that a publication espousing a Jewish perspective would criticize an organization that regularly excoriates Israel, a key piece of Muravchik’s article has nothing to do with Israel — or even terrorist activities.

Muravchik notes, “If the UN is bad not only for the Jews but also for the victims of terrorism in general as well as the victims of tyranny, it has even proved deleterious to the states that dominate most UN bodies — the poorer or so-called developing countries that constitute the Non-Aligned Movement.”

Three years after NAM was born, it spurred the creation of UNCTAD, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, a permanent body led by Argentine economist Raul Prebisch, the thinker who devised something called dependency theory. …

… Thus UNCTAD advised poor countries to erect barriers against commerce with, and investment from, the rich while demanding more foreign aid in the name of a New International Economic Order. It urged citizens of these countries to rely on their governments to mobilize economic resources. In that era scores of newly independent states, largely African, suffered an extreme shortage of highly trained personnel, and the wisdom of the UN carried immense weight. Largely as a result, most of the developing countries pursued statist and autarkic policies that caused decades of economic stagnation. Only when the “little tigers” of East Asia — South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong — demonstrated that the route out of poverty lay in exactly the opposite direction from that prescribed by UNCTAD were Prebisch’s theories abandoned, allowing the developing world as a whole to begin achieving real economic progress.

One could say that the right recipe for helping the poorest of the poor calls for a lot of economic freedom.