Supposing that one believes that U.S. foreign policy is the primary cause of people not having shoes [+], the relevant question would be "Does putting shoes on

Supposing that one believes that U.S. foreign policy is the primary cause of people not having shoes [+], the relevant question would be "Does putting shoes on some kid's feet make it more difficult to change U.S. foreign policy?" If yes, then one could sensibly go to that child and say "Sorry kid, you're going to get Guinea worm, but it is in the service of preventing more Guinea worm in the future." If not, then there is no competition between attempting to fix U.S. foreign policy tomorrow but putting shoes on that kid's feet today. Which is great, because we profoundly don't want that kid to contract Guinea worm. Is there a mechanism by which US decisionmakers become more hostile to your preferred policy if we increase the number of shoes in the world? If so, can you identify which decisionmakers those are and, let's say for a minimum, how they measure the number of extant shoes as their KPI for "must increase the extent of our damaging policies?" How sensitive to that KPI are they? Can we maybe get a thousand shoes without them tightening the screws? How about a million? Where is the red line where "one more shoe causes unnamed policymaker to adopt my disfavored policy?" If we can find that red line, that would be great, because we should produce shoes right up to it. + I tend to think that the reason people do not have shoes is that Mk 1 humans are not born equipped with shoes and that shoes do not exist in the state of nature. The state of "I am a kid, I have no shoes, WTF" predates the existence of the US, imperialism/capitalism/etc, by thousands of years. (The newfangled innovation from capitalism isn't lack-of-shoes-for-poor-people, it is presence-of-shoes-for-some-poor-people. That's not as optimal as presence-of-shoes-for-all-poor-people but I have not heard a convincing rationale on why abandoning capitalism gets us that transition.)