Original thinker

What? Capitalism is moral?

In PJ Media, John Stossel writes about the moral case for capitalism. Read it here.

"The choice doesn’t seem too hard, does it?"

MOTUS links to an article written in Alpha News on April 6 by 26-year-old Alyssa Ahlgren.

My generation is becoming the largest voting bloc in the country. We have an opportunity to continue to propel us forward with the gifts capitalism and democracy has given us. The other option is that we can fall into the trap of entitlement and relapse into restrictive socialist destitution. The choice doesn’t seem too hard, does it?

I’m sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of Democratic candidates calling for policies to “fix” the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around. I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook’s, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become completely blind to it. Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose. These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don’t give them a second thought. We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty. One. Times. Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful.

...My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let’s just say I didn’t have the popular opinion, but I digress.

Let me lay down some universal truths really quick. The United States of America has lifted more people out of abject poverty, spread more freedom and democracy, and has created more innovation in technology and medicine than any other nation in human history. Not only that but our citizenry continually breaks world records with charitable donations, the rags to riches story is not only possible in America but not uncommon, we have the strongest purchasing power on earth, and we encompass 25% of the world’s GDP. The list goes on. However, these universal truths don’t matter. We are told that income inequality is an existential crisis (even though this is not an indicator of prosperity, some of the poorest countries in the world have low-income inequality), we are told that we are oppressed by capitalism (even though it’s brought about more freedom and wealth to the most people than any other system in world history), we are told that the only way we will acquire the benefits of true prosperity is through socialism and centralization of federal power (even though history has proven time and again this only brings tyranny and suffering).

...my generation has ONLY seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn’t live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, or see the rise and fall of socialism and communism. We don’t know what it’s like not to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don’t have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it’s spreading like a plague.

My generation is becoming the largest voting bloc in the country. We have an opportunity to continue to propel us forward with the gifts capitalism and democracy has given us. The other option is that we can fall into the trap of entitlement and relapse into restrictive socialist destitution. The choice doesn’t seem too hard, does it?

Read more here.

Evil vs. fair

Blame it on capitalism!

hat tip Bookworm

How did Socialists light their homes before candles?

Answer: electricity! Andy Puzder takes a look at Venezuela in an opinion piece for Fox News.

How did socialism work in America?

Individually responsible for our own economic fate? Where did that idea come from?

Capitalism versus Socialism

The case for capitalism and technology

James Pethokoukis writes at AEI,

Back in 1995, now-Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said, “I personally happen not to be a great believer in the free enterprise system for many reasons.”

And having watched Sanders during this primary season, it doesn’t appear to me that the self-described democratic socialist has much changed his opinion of capitalism. Which is both amazing and appalling. The single greatest story of human achievement of the past 2,000 years is the dramatic rise in living standards of the past 200 years. It’s an astounding ascent — see above chart — driven by innovative, entrepreneurial capitalism. Free enterprise. Economic freedom.

Yes, workers in advanced economies today are many multiples wealthier — almost incalculably so — than their counterparts in the early 19th century. But here is another way of looking at, thanks to a new study by consultancy Deloitte showing how technology-driving innovation has radically altered lives in Britain for the much better:

1) Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed in the last 144 years.
2) It has been saving us from dull, repetitive, and dangerous work. Agriculture was the first major sector to experience this change. In 1871 it employed 6.6% of the workforce of England and Wales. Today that stands at 0.2%, a 95% decline.


3) Overall, technological innovation has resulted in fewer humans being deployed as sources of muscle power and more engaged in jobs involving the nursing and care of others. Just 1.1% of the workforce was employed in the caring professions during the 1871 census. By 2011, these professions employed almost a quarter of the England and Wales workforce.
4) Technology has boosted employment in knowledge-intensive sectors such as medicine, accounting and professional services.
5) Finally technology has lowered the cost of essentials, raising disposable incomes and creating new demand and jobs. In 1871, there was one hairdresser for every 1,793 English and Welsh citizens; now there is one for every 287. In 1948, a Freed-Eiseman 16-inch TV cost $795 in the US, roughly a quarter of the average annual salary, or roughly $12,000 today. A top of the range TV can be bought today for less than $1,000. On a quality-adjusted basis, the decline in prices is even more pronounced. US CPI data show that the price of a TV has fallen by 98% since 1950.

Read more here.

Millennials prefer a more equitable distribution of (other people’s) wealth

Catherine Rampell writes in the Washington Post about Millenials. They prefer Bernie Sanders and they are the only age group that likes socialism over capitalism.

Both nationwide, and in the early primary states, Bernie Sanders is thoroughly trouncing Clinton among the under-30 set.

In the Iowa caucuses alone, Sanders beat Clinton 84 percent to 14 percent in this age group, according to entrance polls. That’s a 70-point margin. Just for reference, note that in 2008, in the very same state, among the very same demographic, Barack Obama bested Clinton by “only” 46 points. And Obama was young and cool; Sanders is more of an eccentric-grandpa type.

Why are so many young’uns feeling the Bern?

I see two main reasons.

The first is that, to millennials, Sanders’s socialism is a feature, not a bug.

Much of the current conversation about Sanders’s “democratic socialism” is predicated on whether Americans can look past this supposedly toxic label. But millennials love Sanders not despite his socialism, but because of it.

“Socialism” has never been a dirty word for the current cohort of youth, who either didn’t live through the Cold War or don’t remember it. We are more likely to associate socialism with prosperous, egalitarian, relatively well-functioning Scandinavian states — the kinds of places that produce awesome things like Ikea and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” — than with autocrats who starve their people.

Many of us also entered the job market just as unbridled capitalism appeared to blow up the world economy.

Perhaps for this reason, millennials actually seem to prefer socialism to capitalism.

In a recent YouGov survey, 43 percent of respondents under age 30 said they had a favorable opinion of socialism, while just 32 percent said the same about capitalism. Among all ages, races, geographic regions, genders, party affiliations and income levels, millennials were the only demographic that held socialism in higher regard than capitalism.

It’s not just Sanders’s socialist label that sells; it’s his socialist ideas, too.

To a generation that’s broke, in debt, underemployed and stuck in its parents’ basements, promises of a political revolution, more equitable distribution of (other people’s) wealth, a more robust social safety net and free college can sound pretty appealing.

Read more here and here.

Central planning versus market competition

Thomas Sowell writes at National Review,

The fundamental problem of the political Left seems to be that the real world does not fit their preconceptions. Therefore they see the real world as what is wrong, and what needs to be changed, since apparently their preconceptions cannot be wrong.

A never-ending source of grievances for the Left is the fact that some groups are “over-represented” in desirable occupations, institutions, and income brackets, while other groups are “under-represented.”

From all the indignation and outrage about this expressed on the left, you might think that it was impossible that different groups are simply better at different things.

Yet runners from Kenya continue to win a disproportionate share of marathons in the United States, and children whose parents or grandparents came from India have won most of the American spelling bees in the past 15 years. And has anyone failed to notice that the leading professional basketball players have for years been black, in a country where most of the population is white?

...Whole books could be filled with the unequal behavior or performances of people, or the unequal geographic settings in which whole races, nations, and civilizations have developed. Yet the preconceptions of the political Left march on undaunted, loudly proclaiming sinister reasons why outcomes are not equal within nations or between nations.

All this moral melodrama has served as a background for the political agenda of the Left, which has claimed to be able to lift the poor out of poverty, and in general make the world a better place. This claim has been made for centuries and in countries around the world. And it has failed for centuries in countries around the world.

Some of the most sweeping and spectacular rhetoric of the Left occurred in 18th-century France, where the very concept of the Left originated in the fact that people with certain views sat on the left side of the National Assembly.

The French Revolution was their chance to show what they could do when they got the power they sought. In contrast to what they promised — “liberty, equality, fraternity” — what they actually produced were food shortages, mob violence, and dictatorial powers that included arbitrary executions, extending even to their own leaders, such as Robespierre, who died under the guillotine.

In the 20th century, the most sweeping vision of the Left — Communism — spread over vast regions of the world and encompassed well over a billion human beings. Of these, millions died of starvation in the Soviet Union under Stalin and tens of millions in China under Mao.

Milder versions of socialism, with central planning of national economies, took root in India and in various European democracies.

If the preconceptions of the Left were correct, central planning by educated elites who had vast amounts of statistical data at their fingertips and expertise readily available, and were backed by the power of government, should have been more successful than market economies where millions of individuals pursued their own individual interests willy-nilly.

But, by the end of the 20th century, even socialist and communist governments began abandoning central planning and allowing more market competition. Yet this quiet capitulation to inescapable realities did not end the noisy claims of the Left.

In the United States, those claims and policies have reached new heights, epitomized by government takeovers of whole sectors of the economy and unprecedented intrusions into the lives of Americans, of which Obamacare has been only the most obvious example.

Read more here.

Sorry, Bernie

Terry Jones writes at Investors Business Daily,

...not so long ago, the left's big bugbear was poverty, not inequality. Then a funny thing happened: The left had to de-emphasize poverty because, as measured by the World Bank and others, absolute poverty is disappearing fast, thanks to capitalism and the collapse of communism.



That's right. Capitalism — not big government — is killing poverty. Socialism talks about poverty, but capitalism actually does something about it. As this chart shows, 200 years ago, 19 out of 20 people on Earth lived on less than $2 a day, adjusted for inflation, the definition of absolute poverty. Today, for the first time ever, less than one in 10 people live in this kind of abject state.

...Chalk up a victory for the Industrial Revolution, the 20th century's boom in capitalist factory production, the growth of global markets, the spread of cutting-edge technology and the profoundly liberating idea of personal freedom. These gifts of capitalism have enriched people the world over.

Read more here.

The world would be better if more people were like Americans

Tom Krannawitter has a few things to say to college students who think the United States is a uniquely shameful source of social injustice:

For the coddled snowflakes enrolled in American colleges and universities -- especially the ones tempted to protest the United States as some uniquely shameful source of social injustice -- consider the following:

There are just over one million public charities in the United States today. There are just over one hundred thousand private foundations. And there are about four hundred thousand other types of tax-exempt, social service organizations such as fraternal organizations and civic leagues, for a total of over 1,500,000 individual charitable organizations!

Last year, American charitable organizations gave in donations over $350 BILLION DOLLARS! That's $358,380,000,000 to be more precise. Not far from half a trillion dollars in private giving!

* * * *

The United States tops all other nations in terms of charitable giving. And each and every dollar that is given by an American to someone who needs help represents the hard work of free citizens who make profits by producing goods and services that other people want, need, and value.

In other words, free American citizens make a profit by helping others and making others happy, THEN those same profit-making Americans turn around and help people yet MORE through charitable giving!

Just think: In little more than two short centuries, the United States went from a nation of poor, subsistence dirt farmers to the most prosperous and most charitable nation the world has ever seen! And how did Americans do this? The protection of property rights and individual freedom, and the entrepreneurship fueled by freedom, make all this prosperity, profit, and giving possible.

Isn't capitalism a beautiful thing?

* * * *

To boot, when people from the around the world were surveyed in terms of willingness to help a stranger, individually, Americans ranked number one. Which means: Americans are pretty decent people, at least compared to the rest of the world.

Our colleges and universities might encourage young Americans to be embarrassed and ashamed of their country. But the truth is, the world would be better if more people were more like Americans, and more nations were more like the United States.
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A few choice words for Pope Francis

At Newsmax George Will has some things to say to Pope Francis.

Poverty has probably decreased more in the last two centuries than it has in the preceding three millennia because of industrialization powered by fossil fuels. Only economic growth has ever produced broad amelioration of poverty, and since growth began in the late 18th century, it has depended on such fuels.

...Matt Ridley, author of "The Rational Optimist," notes that coal supplanting wood fuel reversed deforestation, and "fertilizer manufactured with gas halved the amount of land needed to produce a given amount of food."

The capitalist commerce that Francis disdains is the reason the portion of the planet's population living in "absolute poverty" ($1.25 a day) declined from 53 percent to 17 percent in three decades after 1981. Even in low-income countries, writes economist Indur Goklany, life expectancy increased from between 25 to 30 years in 1900 to 62 years today.

...Francis grew up around the rancid political culture of Peronist populism, the sterile redistributionism that has reduced his Argentina from the world's 14th highest per-capita GDP in 1900 to 63rd today. Francis' agenda for the planet, "global regulatory norms," would globalize Argentina's downward mobility.

As the world spurns his church's teachings about abortion, contraception, divorce, same-sex marriage and other matters, Francis jauntily makes his church congruent with the secular religion of "sustainability." Because this is hostile to growth, it fits Francis' seeming sympathy for medieval stasis, when his church ruled the roost, economic growth was essentially nonexistent and life expectancy was around 30.

...He stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources. Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation's premises.

Read more here.

Don't preach to us about what to do for the poor!

Thomas Sowell writes at World Net Daily about how

Pope Francis blithely throws around the phrase “the poor,” and blames poverty on what other people are doing or not doing to or for “the poor.”

Any serious look at the history of human beings over the millennia shows that the species began in poverty. It is not poverty, but prosperity, that needs explaining. Poverty is automatic, but prosperity requires many things – none of which is equally distributed around the world or even within a given society.

...In 1900, only 3 percent of American homes had electric lights but more than 99 percent had them before the end of the century. Infant mortality rates were 165 per thousand in 1900 and 7 per thousand by 1997. By 2001, most Americans living below the official poverty line had central air conditioning, a motor vehicle, cable television with multiple TV sets and other amenities.

A scholar specializing in the study of Latin America said that the official poverty level in the United States is the upper middle class in Mexico. The much criticized market economy of the United States has done far more for the poor than the ideology of the left.

Pope Francis’ own native Argentina was once among the leading economies of the world, before it was ruined by the kind of ideological notions he is now promoting around the world.

Read more here.

Feckless

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead puts the European immigration crisis into context:

What we are witnessing today is a crisis of two civilizations: The Middle East and Europe are both facing deep cultural and political problems that they cannot solve. The intersection of their failures and shortcomings has made this crisis much more destructive and dangerous than it needed to be—and carries with it the risk of more instability and more war in a widening spiral.

The migration crisis enveloping Europe and much of the Middle East today is one of the worst humanitarian disasters since the 1940s. Millions of desperate people are on the march: Sunni refugees driven out by the barbarity of the Assad regime in Syria, Christians and Yazidis fleeing the pornographic violence of Islamic State, millions more of all faiths and no faith fleeing poverty and oppression without end. Parents are entrusting their lives and the lives of their young children to rickety boats and unscrupulous criminal syndicates along the Mediterranean coast, professionals and business people are giving up their livelihoods and investments, farmers are abandoning their land, and from North Africa to Syria, the sick and the old are on the road, carrying a few treasured belongings on a new trail of tears.

The crisis in the Middle East has to do with much more than the breakdown of order in Syria and Libya. It runs deeper than the poisonous sectarian and ethnic hatreds behind the series of wars stretching from Pakistan to North Africa. At bottom, we are witnessing the consequences of a civilization’s failure either to overcome or to accommodate the forces of modernity. One hundred years after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and 50 years after the French left Algeria, the Middle East has failed to build economies that allow ordinary people to live with dignity, has failed to build modern political institutions and has failed to carve out the place of honor and respect in world affairs that its peoples seek.

Today we are watching the failure of Islamism. From the Muslim Brotherhood to Islamic State, Islamist movements have had no more success in curing the ills of Arab civilization than any of the secular movements of the past. Worse, the brutal fanaticism and nihilistic violence of groups like Islamic State undercuts respect for more moderate versions of Islamic spirituality and thought.

The Turks and the Iranians have had more economic and institutional success than the Arabs, but in both Turkey and Iran today, the outlook is bleak. Iran is ruled by a revolutionary alliance of reactionary clerics and hungry thugs, and it is committed to a regional policy of confrontation and sectarian war. Like the Soviet Union, Iran is an uneasy conglomeration of national and cultural groups held together by a radical but increasingly stale ideology. Turkey, too, is cursed by blind Islamist enthusiasm and unresolved ethnic and ideological chasms. Neither country is immune to the violence sweeping the region, and neither country has been able to develop policies that would calm rather than roil their turbulent surroundings.

At the same time, foreign values are challenging traditional beliefs and practices across the region. Women throughout the Islamic world are seeking to shape theological and social ideas to better reflect their own experience. Modern science and historical and textual criticism pose many of the questions for traditional Islamic piety that 19th-century science and biblical criticism posed for Christianity. Young people continue to be exposed to information, narratives and images that are difficult to reconcile with traditions they were raised to take for granted.

As hundreds of thousands of refugees stumble from the chaos of an imploding Arab world toward Europe, and as millions more seek refuge closer to home, we see a crisis of confidence in the very structures of Middle Eastern civilization, including religion. Reports that hundreds of Iranian and other refugees from the Islamic world are seeking Christian baptism in Europe can be seen as one aspect of this crisis. If people feel that the religion they were raised in and the civilization of which they are a part cannot master the problems of daily life, they will seek alternatives.

In eastern and central Europe, the social and economic conditions for absorbing mass migration from the Middle East simply don’t exist. The relatively homogenous ethnic nation states that now comprise the region were created through generations of warfare, often accompanied by episodes of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Most of these states enjoyed a brief period of independence between the two world wars and were then engulfed, first by the Nazis and later by the Soviet empire. Their independence and security still feel fragile, and most of their citizens still believe that the role of the state is to protect the well-being of their own ethnic group and express its cultural values.

And the flow of refugees to Europe could easily grow. The Turkish war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party could escalate. Social breakdown or the victory of radical Islamist forces in Egypt could provoke a mass flight of the Copts, the last remaining large Christian population in a region that has seen one Christian community after another exterminated or forced into exile over the last 150 years. The sectarian war in Syria could intensify and spread into Lebanon. The intensifying religious conflict across the Sahel and northern sub-Saharan Africa could create the kind of political and economic insecurity that would produce vast flows of desperate migrants and asylum seekers.

The humanitarian question of refugees and asylum seekers cannot be separated from the bankruptcy of Western security policy in Syria and Libya, and the bankruptcy of Western policy cannot be separated from the long-standing difficulties that many European states have in taking a responsible attitude toward questions of military security.

The utter failure of Western policy in both Libya and Syria has to be seen for what it is: not just a political blunder but a humanitarian crime. The feckless mix of intervention and indifference in Libya and the equally feckless failure to intervene in Syria have helped to trigger the flows of migrants that are overwhelming Europe’s institutions.

...Capitalism, the social engine without which neither Europe nor the U.S. would have the wealth or strength to embrace liberal values with any hope of success, is often seen as a cruel, anti-human system that is leading the world to a Malthusian climate catastrophe. Military strength, without which the liberal states would be overwhelmed, is regarded with suspicion in the U.S. and with abhorrence in much of Europe. Too many people in the West interpret pluralism and tolerance in ways that forbid or unrealistically constrain the active defense of these values against illiberal states like Russia or illiberal movements like radical Islam.

Read more here.

A victory for conservatives

Daniel Henninger reports in the Wall Street Journal,

Last year, the College Board, the nonprofit corporation that controls all the high-school Advanced Placement courses and exams, published new guidelines for the AP U.S. history test. They read like a left-wing dream. Obsession with identity, gender, class, crimes against the American Indian and the sins of capitalism suffused the proposed guidelines for teachers of AP American history.

As of a few weeks ago, that tilt in the guidelines has vanished. The College Board’s rewritten 2015 teaching guidelines are almost a model of political fair-mindedness. This isn’t just an about-face. It is an important political event.

The earlier guidelines characterized the discovery of America as mostly the story of Europeans bringing pestilence, destructive plants and cultural obliteration to American Indians. The new guidelines put it this way: “Mutual misunderstandings between Europeans and Native Americans often defined the early years of interaction and trade as each group sought to make sense of the other. Over time, Europeans and Native Americans adopted some useful aspects of each other’s culture.”

Also new: “The effort for American independence was energized by colonial leaders such as Benjamin Franklin, as well as by popular movements that included the political activism of laborers, artisans, and women.” The earlier version never suggested the existence of Franklin—or Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison or anyone resembling a Founding Father. Now they’re back. Even the Federalist Papers were fished out of the memory hole.

Most incredible of all, the private enterprise system is, as they say, reimagined as a force for good: “As the price of many goods decreased, workers’ real wages increased, providing new access to a variety of goods and services.” There’s an idea that has fallen out of favor the past six years.

...What really happened was the resurrection of an American idea the left wants to extinguish—federalism. Some states began to push back. Legislative opposition to the guidelines formed in Georgia, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Nebraska, Tennessee, Colorado and Texas.

Stanley Kurtz, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has argued that the College Board was concerned that its lucrative nationwide testing franchise would be at risk if states began to replace it with their own courses. I think he’s right.

This is a significant event. It marks an important turn in the American culture wars that exploded at the Republican convention in 1992 with the religious right, a movement that faded but whose sense of political alienation has remained alive, whether in the original tea-party groups or today with voters adopting the improbable Donald Trump.

...Is the country polarized? How could it not be? Is there a solution? Take a look at how the AP U.S. history mess was handled. Someone rewrote those guidelines into a reasonable political accommodation. It is not impossible.

Read more here.

An example of why capitalism is better than socialism

The editor of a blog entitled Future of Capitalism writes,

The Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign store is telling prospective buyers to "allow 2-3 weeks for delivery" of a T-shirt with the Bernie 2016 logo.

...The T-shirt is "union-made and printed in the USA." Under socialist protectionist isolationism, products are made in America, which is good for a few unionized textile employees. But the result is that the shelves are bare, and consumers have to wait weeks to obtain the products they actually want.

Want to know why capitalism is better than socialist protectionism? Go to Amazon.com and search Bernie Sanders 2016 t-shirt. You get 1,500 results, in-stock and available for delivery in one or two days.

"The dung of the devil"

Robert Godwin writes at One Cosmos,

I see that Pope Francis just called capitalism "the dung of the devil." But I wonder if that is what he actually said, for the piece later quotes him as referring to "the unfettered pursuit of money" as "the dung of the devil," which is something else entirely.

For example, Greece -- an anti-capitalist pile of devil dung if ever there was one -- is clearly engaging in an unfettered pursuit of money, the difference being that capitalism actually earns the money by producing something people want. Conversely, Greece produces nothing anyone wants and wants to be paid for it.

Robbing a bank is an unfettered pursuit of money. Offering things people want at prices they can afford is definitely fettered, as any businessman knows. Among other things, it is fettered by production costs, by taxes, by regulations, by competitors, by consumer preferences, and by civil law.

Where but in a socialist tyranny is the pursuit of money unfettered? Even Obama- or Clinton-style crony capitalism is somewhat fettered, unless you believe people send all those millions to the Clintons with no expectation of a return on their investment.

...More generally, the whole concept of sacrifice -- present in all religiosity -- entails an implicit awareness of spiritual exchange, however warped. For example, the Buddhist sacrifices the ego to nirvana, the leftist our prosperity to his resentments, the Islamist innocent men, women, and children to his transcendent sadism.

Read more here.

Production precedes consumption

Kevin Williamson writes at National Review,

Those who put distribution at the top of their list of priorities both make the error of assuming the existence of some exogenous agency that oversees distribution (that being the Distribution Fairy) and entirely ignore the vital question of what gets produced and by whom. Poverty is the direct by-product of low levels of production; the United States and Singapore are fat and happy with $53,101 and $64,584 in per capita economic output, respectively; Zimbabwe, which endured the services of a government very much interested in the redistribution of capital, gets to divide up $788 per person per year, meaning that under circumstances of perfect mathematical equality life would still be miserable for everybody. Sweden can carve up its per capita pie however it likes, but it’s still going to be 22.5 percent smaller than the U.S. pie and less than two-thirds the size of Singapore’s tasty pastry. You cannot redistribute what you don’t have — and that holds true not only for countries but, finally, for the planet and the species, which of course is what globalization is all about. That men of the cloth, of all people, should be blind to what is really happening right now on the global economic scale is remarkable, ironic, and sad. Cure one or two people of blindness and you’re a saint; prevent blindness in millions and you’re Monsanto.

Read more here.