If someone asks about advice because they want to understand a field they are not familiar with I wouldn't sneer at them. But when someone takes a dogmatic ideological position that will make already impoverished people worse off because they couldn't bother to learn about the world I won't be particularly respectful because I find that attitude difficult to respect.
I don't think direct cash transfers or universal basic income are comparable to the concept that was being discussed. I agree there are interesting results there, though I'm personally ideologically biased in favour of cash transfers, so I try not to get too excited.
Your point that development economists often like to claim that development aid is good might well be true. People like to prop up their field. Now, I'm not saying there should be no aid. What I'm pointing out is that aid has not been an important factor in alleviating poverty. If it were, countries that received lots of it (like Ghana or Tanzania) would have been lifted out of poverty, not places like China or South Korea.
The impacts of other things, like stable property rights, functioning capital markets, rule of law, accountability in government, some basic level of social justice is much larger. At least, this is true to all the research I've seen on the subject (admittedly I haven't been looking much at this field in the last few years). If you have data backing the notion that transfers of capital of the sort advocated by MOP has huge impacts on economic growth, feel free to present them.
But again, the reason some countries are really poor and others really rich isn't primarily that someone gave the latter group a lot of money and is withholding that bunch of money from the former. That isn't negating the existence of historical injustices or even saying we shouldn't do something to redress those injustices. But it is intellectually lazy to make that the scapegoat for economic inequality in the world.
Getting people out of poverty in developing countries is really important. The very least moral obligation one can put on people with the relatively high level of power and Western citizen has is to educate oneself sufficiently on it so as to not argue for policies that will keep them poor. So, yeah, I might be snarky about that. I don't mind it if you get all madz about it, that's your prerogative. But I'd find it more interesting if you spent less time attacking my personal character and more engaging with the substance of the issue.
The tangent on trade seems a bit off-topic, to me, but I'll comment briefly. There are nuances to trade policy but I'm yet to see a convincing argument for deviations from free trade, especially when put in the real world that some economists avoid.
