Two Years, One Lesson
by Alec Mouhibian
The progressive movement sprouted from the idea that the world would really get somewhere if only everybody let their lives be run by progressives. Central to the idea was a centralized and empowered government that could run most things better than free individuals. Its spirit and nature was defined by one of its earliest triumphs—the prohibition of alcohol—when women wanted their husbands to stop drinking and spend more quality time with them. The phrase “having it both ways” was obviously not common at the time.
Progressivism was the dominant influence in the twentieth century, taking hold at different degrees in different places. Its legacy over the years includes 100 million slaughtered bodies, massive starvation, economic devastation and poverty, erosion of once-fertile agriculture, a slew of dictatorships and—in its milder forms—depression and stagnation. Meanwhile Hong Kong, one of the few countries that hadn’t been “progressed,” ended up heaps and bounds ahead of most everywhere else.
As if a hundred years aren’t enough, each of the last two years has ended with a major international headline that has reinforced the same lesson from opposite ends.
The first headline, inked toward the end of 2003, came from Zimbabwe. Marxist dictator Robert Mugabe had spent the previous three years nationalizing all of the nation’s private farmland, and now six million of its citizens were on the brink of starvation. Corn production, its staple diet and one-time major export, had declined by two-thirds in those three years. Once again, the chickens of Marxism came home to roost by specifically not coming home to roost.
Then, around last Thanksgiving, a report came from the World Bank. It showed that the world experienced its best economic year ever, with global growth emerging to 4%. The poor led the way, with 6% growth in developing countries (5% even if you don’t count China, India, and Russia). Major growth was coupled with major declines in poverty, and the extent of both in each nation was directly correlated to how much privatization, free trade, and globalization it has allowed.
Why is any of this a surprise to anyone? Because due to the comfortable disposition of progressives, it has been everyone else—especially the poor—who's ended up soiled from the progressive wet-dream. And they still haven’t woken up.
Western progressives supported Mugabe when he came to power and announced his agenda, just as they oppose globalization and rail against multinational corporations. It seems that every week there’s some anti-globalization event on campus, organized by those who think that economic ignorance justifies moral righteousness.
Those who complain that corporations are “exploiting” the poor don’t realize that a corporation can only employ people who want be employed by it. The wages offered by multinational corporations in the third-world are on average twice as high as local wages. That’s still very low by our standards, but that’s because those countries are going through the necessary, structural first-stages of development.
The infant mortality rate in London was 75% in 1729. Eighty years later it was down to 32%. Children that would have formerly died were laboring in the fields. Another eighty years later and not only was infant mortality miniscule, but industry had revolutionized life so much that children did not have to work anymore. Had the British government imposed restrictions on that development—as African socialist governments do to their economies—Britain would not be where it is today. It would be where Africa is today.
But perhaps most annoying of all is the claim that globalization is “destroying cultures.” When progressives think it’s more important for western tourists to see basket-weaving exhibits than for people to be well-fed, then the line has been crossed between being a knee-jerk reactionary and a knee-jerk jerk.
[This column was originally published in The Daily Nexus, the newspaper of UC Santa Barbara.]
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