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| Lileks: Capitalism causes earthquakes! (Not!) |
| 2005-10-13 |
| The Screedblog. EFL. What caused the Pakistan earthquakes? If you trust Venezuelaâs Castro-wannabe Hugo Chavez, it was the free market. Adam Smithâs invisible hand, flipping mankind the bird. The "world global capitalist model,â Chavez insisted, â⊠is destroying the world. The world is in danger. Never has there been such disasters, hurricanes, droughts, torrential rains. Incredible! The world is dangerously off balance." By this theory, Gaia is mad at us because we cut down trees and buy sneakers. Gaia is peeved because people want to drive to work in offices heated by nuclear power. We should all push a donkey cart up a rutted road and sit in the market all day waiting for someone to buy our withered tubers, so we can buy a small piece of burlap soaked in sugar to feed our nine children. Gaia hates capitalism. Chavez, of course, believes none of this; if he opposed this âunbalancedâ world heâd cap the oil wells and command his people to burn dung. itâs just the latest stick with which the internationalist left can thwap the piñata of the rich free West. It gets Chavez closer to the day when college students, yearning to poke a thumb in dadâs eye, will dump the Che T-shirt for one with Hugoâs mug. But ask Chavez: which killed more people in the Pakistan earthquake â the shrug of the earth, or oligarchy? Kickbacks and corruption are so endemic to unfree societies like Pakistan that government projects might as well be made of saltine crackers and Scotch tape. This isnât blaming the victim. Itâs blaming the victimizers. The only bright spot: if Pakistan builds its nuclear weapons as good as its poor-people hospitals, theyâll fall apart in a shower of bolts and sparkly isotopes ten yards off the pad. But probably not. Priorities, you know. If Chavezâ opportunistic eco-twaddle smacks of the sort of religious eschatology you get from Pat Robertson, it should. The pious leftism of the international nomenklatura is a religion. The United States may not be their Great Satan, but itâs the devil they know. The bureaucrats and the EU anointed are the priesthood - and the Nobel peace prize is the means of bestowing sainthood. . . . |
| Posted by:Mike |