I have been excluded from yet another elite.

"The typical Internet user worldwide is male, under 35 years old, with a university education and high income, urban based and English speaking - a member of a very elite minority."

Guess which two don't apply to me.

Hang on to your wallet, the UNtouchables are after it again. That quote is from a new UN report styled "Globalization with a Human Face" (remember "Communism with a Human Face?").

The United Nations proposes that Americans tax themselves $70 billion annually to build Internet infrastructure in poor countries. Did you get that number? $70,000,000,000. Every year. Not contributions. Not buying greeting cards to help hungry kiddies. Tax.

The presumptuous inhabitants of the upended anthill in New York and its Swiss appendage have latched onto the Internet as yet another lever to persuade America to convert itself into a 3d-world country by exporting its wealth.

This column is not based on one of those inane Internet hoaxes that occasionally flood your e-mail inbox, like the one about the US postal service conspiring to impose a tax on e-mail. Unlike the USPS, which knows better, the UNthinkables imagine they need only whistle and America's apathetic pets will heel, roll over and dish out the dough.

You can read their screed yourself at www.undp.org/hdro/99.htm (see chapter two). Sensitive readers should take some Maalox (or No-Doz) before subjecting themselves to this bureaucratic jetsam. (For a summary see www.undp.org/hdro/E3.html.)

The report proposes a tax on individuals of one US cent on every 100 e-mails.

House majority leader Dick Armey puts it well (www.freedom.gov, "What's New"): "Every time you turn around, it seems there is another agency or bureaucracy looking to get its greedy mitts on the Internet through new taxes."

But even were we so simple-minded as to adopt such a tax, it would not achieve the UNknowables' stated objective. And they know it.

The real needs of poor countries are far more basic: food, water, freedom from malaria and cruel, corrupt governments for starters.

Supposing we ignored the realities, sending PCs to every village in Benin, Rwanda and whichever other nations we don't happen to be bombing at the moment. Where would they plug them in? Most people in the world don't have running water - hell, a substantial number don't have wells or outhouses - let alone electricity or telephones.

Contrast this with the lifestyles of the international aid agency Pooh-Bahs (the "Lords of Poverty," as British author Graham Hancock calls them in his excellent book of that title). They flourish, tax-free, in excruciating luxury as they patronizingly propagandize taxpayers to subsidize their misguided missions, while they collect objets d'art to adorn their townhouses.

A large percentage of the world's population, and some of our own, is hungry and illiterate. Only the arrogant "aristocracy of mercy" could imagine that the priorities of those proud people include e-mail, chat rooms, Yahoo searches, online auctions or eTrade accounts.

The "masters of disaster" should heed Mencken's dictum: "For every problem there is a solution that is simple, direct and wrong."

Do the UNbearables intend that our billions should ever be repaid? Wiser far are the peoples of East Africa, whose Kiswahili proverb says, "Kukopa arusi, kulipa matanga":

Borrowing is a wedding; paying is a mourning.

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