WASHINGTON, DC -- Recent employment notices show how principles can give way once people arrive in Washington. Haley Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, was once a daily fixture on television but lately has dropped out of sight. He has now accepted a rather unusual position for someone once committed to smaller and more responsible government.

Television mogul and billionaire Ted Turner has hired the affable Barbour, to lobby Congress on behalf of the United Nations. Mr. Turner, a true believer in bigger government who considered running for president, has donated $1 billion of his own money to this organization, but he wants the United States to pay its dues.

The US taxpayers, as it happens, shoulder most of the UN’s heavy lifting, particularly the peacekeeping missions, for which the nation is not always compensated. For this reason, some policymakers say America owes less that the UN says it does. But there are other reasons for concern, besides the impossibility of a bureaucratic solution to human problems.

The UN is a vast sinkhole of waste, inefficiency, and corruption, headed from 1971-1981 by a former Nazi war criminal, Kurt Waldheim, and staffed by overpaid bureaucrats elected by no one in the United States, and often from tyrannical regimes. It might be remembered that the UN promoted the "New World Information Order," a blatant attempt to control the press. And the UN waited until 1978 to consider whether the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia was violating human rights, three years after two million people had been murdered. China, still a Stalinist dictatorship, can veto a Security Council resolution.

This cumbersome body is also hostile to the free market and free trade.

The UN is dominated by the zero-sum view that the prosperity of some countries causes the poverty of others. It functions as a kind of global welfare office promoting transfer of wealth under various guises such as the "North-South economic dialogue" and debt relief. Much of Third World debt has been incurred through misguided command-and-control economic policies now being abandoned by their former advocates.

While acknowledging recent economic advances in virtually every country--all caused by market forces, not the UN--Mark Mallock Brown of the UN development program said that markets have also brought "dislocation and heartache." To such ignorance, the UN adds a Luddite initiative.

The Internet, which neither the UN nor Al Gore had any role in creating, benefits only the well-off and educated, leaving the "unconnected poor" out of the global conversation, says the latest UN report on living standards. Actually, the Internet offers the poor unprecedented opportunities. The UN report offers no plan to help extend the Internet in the Third World. That might reduce the need for organizations like the United Nations.

The free market, individual responsibility, and limited government are principles that create wealth, but these are not principles that the UN promotes. Any organization that sees the free market and Internet as impediments to prosperity and progress, particularly for poor countries, is itself an impediment to prosperity and unworthy of support.

But experience shows that there are always people in Washington willing to support organizations and policies that oppose their principles, as long as the price is right.

-- K. Lloyd Billingsley