International Monetary Fund Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn is out after being charged with sexual assault against a hotel maid in New York. Unfortunately, many members of the world’s governing elite stand ready to take his place. Who should succeed Strauss-Kahn — a European or someone from the developing world? If the criterion is the welfare of ordinary people, the answer is simple: No one should succeed him. The IMF (along with allied agencies such as the World Bank) should be abolished. It does not improve most people’s lives, but rather imposes corporatist “neoliberalism” on troubled countries and suppresses the emergence of free markets. The IMF is the centerpiece of Keynes’ postwar Bretton Woods scheme, designed to coordinate central banking worldwide and enable the economic planners in the United States and its closest allies to shape the world economy. When the system of fixed exchange rates ended in 1971, the IMF assumed a new mission: to be 9-1-1 for profligate, debt-ridden governments that couldn’t repay their loans to Western banks or buy enough exports to keep the Western economies humming.The U.S. government forces American taxpayers to provide about 17 percent of the IMF’s $340 billion slush fund. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is the U.S. member of the board of governors, with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke the alternate governor. That should be enough to establish that the IMF’s agenda is not free markets. The agency claims to help troubled countries by monitoring the world economy, providing technical advice and lending money to governments that can’t pay their debts. Its record is dismal.The IMF has been bad at foreseeing crises. But why would bureaucrats living off the taxpayers, with no personal capital at risk, be expected to spot economic trouble? Bureaucrats can’t know what they need to know because the crucial knowledge doesn’t exist as easily accessible data.The promise of “technical assistance” is a joke because economies aren’t machines but networks of human activity. The IMF’s advice — commonly to raise taxes — is usually counterproductive, but since it often carries the “free market” label, it creates public resentment against real market reform.Even when it gives proper advice, say, to abolish price controls on food, the failure of the government to remove other interference with the market — licensing, franchises, patents and so on — can impose hardship on already suffering people. The “free market” then is blamed. Food riots occurred some years ago in Egypt under just such circumstances, and as a result market reforms are widely distrusted there.IMF loans seem altruistic, but in fact they bail out rulers from the consequences of their exploitative schemes — sparing them the necessity of radical change, such as land reform and free banking — and their creditors — Wall Street banks typically. American farmers and other exporters have lobbied for increased U.S. contributions to the IMF in the belief that more loans to failing countries mean more sales abroad. If the loans are repaid, the money comes out of the hides of poor taxpayers in the developing world.The IMF emphasizes that loans always come with “conditionality,” but that’s small comfort. The deepest violations of individual liberty and market principles are left untouched. Real markets require individual liberty, free banking, zero legal barriers to entrepreneurship and property rights for ordinary people. Markets are not free when large tracts of land are controlled by a feudal elite, leaving most people little choice but to take whatever is given. Their acceptance may represent the “best available option,” but if their choice set has been artificially constricted, that’s not saying much.For decades the IMF has fostered long-term dependency, perpetual indebtedness, moral hazard and politicization, while sullying true market reform and forestalling revolutionary liberal change. The solution is not for the IMF to impose free markets, even if it had the will or the ability. That would smack of imperialism and, writes former World Bank economist William Easterly, would have “patronizing echoes of the white man’s burden.”The IMF should be scrapped and the people suffering under kleptocracy left to discover for themselves the requirements for improving their own lives. How much more “help” from the West can they stand?Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation (www.fff.org).
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Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.
“I was a library kid. I walked to the library after school,” she said.
For Sher, the library is as much about the people as it about the books.
“Part of the job I love so much is that running the library is such a community,” she said.
She treasures the relationships she has built, whether recommending books, celebrating accomplishments or helping patrons through difficult times.
“I am thankful that our community is so supportive of the library, unlike what is happening in some other places where librarians are villainized,” Sher said.
Sher takes pride in the Hunt Library’s reputation for being “open and welcoming to everyone. People come in and see things and get pulled into things they weren’t expecting. Our library is seen as a positive force.”
Sher came to Falls Village after being awarded a fellowship at Adamah Farm, then a program of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center. She worked at pickling, in the greenhouse and later in the development office. She also worked as a nanny.
At the same time, “I was in the library all the time,” she recalled. “I’m a voracious reader. The library is where I met a lot of my first friends in Falls Village.”
She became assistant librarian at Hunt and worked in that position for almost a decade before becoming the executive director four years ago.
Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.L. Tomaino
Sher met her husband, Adam, while working at Adamah. They had their wedding there in 2012. He now emcees many events which she co-organizes with the Falls Village Recreation Commission.
Sher and her family live near the library.
“It’s an easy commute,” she said with a smile. “My kids run back and forth. I can go home to walk the dog if I need to.”
“My kids have grown up here.” Her oldest son, Eli, “loves volunteering. He helps with Augustfest and often helps set up chairs for ArtWall gatherings.” Her younger son, Noah, is often at events and was eager to taste cookies at last year’s holiday cookie swap.
When she is not at the library, Sher likes to hike with her family. Bella, their Portuguese water dog, often accompanies them.
Sher enjoys seeking out people to offer events at the library.
“I do a lot of different community programming. It is one of my favorite parts of the job.”
Augustfest, featuring food, music and an auction, is the library’s biggest fundraiser.
“This summer we had a record 152 attendees, which was pretty incredible.”
Yonah Sadeh, a filmmaker from Falls Village, inaugurated the VideoWall this year, Sher explained.
“I’ve known Yonah since he was two. It’s wonderful to work with him as an adult.”
The VideoWall complements the library’s ArtWall, which showcases a new artist each month. Sher praised the ArtWall committee for its work and highlighted December’s popular “12x12 Show,” featuring works by local artists, each measuring 12 by 12 inches and priced at $150.
Sher added that some of the artists who exhibit at the ArtWall offer workshops to students at Kellogg School, next door to the library. In September, artist Danielle Mailer worked with the children. Vincent Inconiglios taught a class last November.
Being next to the school, said Sher, is a great advantage.
“Kids are coming after school, to see friends, work on projects, find a great book. Kids that love the library end up using the library as grownups.”
This past year, in partnership with Adamah, the library and school created a garden, with excess produce made available at The Center on Main.
This year is Sher’s second year participating in the Troutbeck Symposium in Amenia with James King, director of the library at Salisbury School. The Troutbeck Symposium is “a gathering of a year of student historical inquiry across the region” in which students “uncover stories that have been overlooked, forgotten, or never recorded.”
Last year, Sher and King began a project with a group of students researching Irish immigrants in Falls Village, exploring ancestry and creating small magazines about their findings.
They continued this year, visiting St. Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery on Dublin Road, cleaning seven gravestones and even righting one with the help of stonemason and gravestone restoration expert Karl Munson. Paul Kozeazny, a representative of the Catholic archdiocese, helped secure access to the site.
A film documenting their activities will be shown at the symposium in spring 2027.
A full schedule of programs and events, ranging from tech help to ceramic mug-making, can be found on the library’s website.
Despite spending her days surrounded by books, and a busy schedule of programming, Sher still loves to settle in with a book at home.
For more information on library programs and events, visit huntlibrary.org
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Touré was born in northern Mali in 1981. His father, the renowned guitarist Ali Farka Touré, came from a family of soldiers and wanted his son to join the army. The younger Touré studied drums and the calabash and practiced guitar in secret. He earned his father’s blessing to pursue music shortly before Ali died in 2006, and they played two tracks together on Vieux’s debut album.
Touré is known for his deft, polyrhythmic playing, and his songs grow out of riffs that repeat and layer to hypnotic effect. He draws on rock, blues, Latin music and various African traditions. This distinctive blend builds on his father’s work adapting the sonic traditions of Mali’s arid north to the guitar.
Vieux’s album “Mon Pays” (“My Country,” 2013) honored Mali’s culture after Tuareg separatists and extremist groups seized the north in 2012. “Samba” (2017) was recorded before about 50 listeners in Woodstock, New York. In 2022 came “Les Racines” (“The Roots”), a return to his father’s desert blues, and “Ali,” on which he and the trio Khruangbin reworked eight of the elder Touré’s songs.
Touré leads the Ali Farka Touré Foundation, which focuses on cultural and educational work in Mali. Around the anniversary of Ali’s death, it holds a festival in Bamako, Mali’s capital. Bamako has been under blockade for much of the past year, besieged by JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate. Against this backdrop, Touré continues to carry the music of Mali to audiences abroad.
At the Nov. 5 concert, Touré’s desert blues will share the bill with Gnawa, the music LanGus plays, which developed in Morocco among West Africans who were brought north across the desert as enslaved people. Gnawa is religious music traditionally performed at all-night healing ceremonies called lila, intended to carry participants into trance.
Samir LanGusProvided
LanGus was born and raised outside Agadir, Morocco, and began learning Gnawa from its masters at age 8. He plays the sintir, a three-stringed bass lute made of wood and camel skin. The player strikes a low string with the thumb to create a deep, resonant pulse. Iron castanets clatter over the sintir’s bass line, and vocalists trade call-and-response refrains.
LanGus infuses the tradition with jazz and improvisation. In New York, he founded the ensemble Innov Gnawa. His first solo album, “Gnawa Love,” came out in February.
Touré and LanGus’s Nov. 5 concert is one of the last public events at Race Brook Lodge, which is for sale and ended full-service operations at the end of 2025. The lodge’s final scheduled event, on Nov. 6, is an evening of Rumi’s poetry with translator and vocalist Haleh Liza Gafori, cellist Isabel Castellvi and ceremonial bard James Bird.
For tickets, visit rblodge.com.
James FitzGerald is a student at Yale Law School, where he focuses on ecological restoration and international environmental cooperation. He splits his time between Lakeville and New Haven.
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