6th Apr, 2003

Statist Economics 101

Check out the latest from Capitalism Magazine: The UN’s Power Path: Restricting Freedom Under the Mantra of "Sustainable Development"

It’s a revealing look at UN’s Sustainable Development program, which is the "best policy model for developing nations" according to my "economic development" professor.

The UN makes no secret of its plans for a world-wide regime that controls every aspect of our lives:

"Nature has an integral set of different values (cultural, spiritual and material) where humans are one strand of nature’s web and all living creatures are considered equal. Therefore the natural way is the right way and human activities should be molded along nature’s rhythms." (UN Biodiversity Treaty)

Echoing the UN, my prof outlined a three-tier socialist approach to economic development: "social equity," "economic prosperity," (in the form of central planning) and "ecological integrity."

There are many other repulsive things I hear in my my class, and since I can’t very well argue with the prof (it’s not worth getting a bad grade over) I write my own rebuttals to them later. During my last class, she explained the principles of trade and the benefits of voluntary exchange, and then went on to say that a policy of unilateral free trade may be bad for developing nations because of (a) less-than ideal market conditions (which somehow make socialism more efficient) (b) rich nations with high tariffs that "steal" from poor ones (so let’s punish domestic consumers for the mistakes of foreign governments) and (b) globalization diminishing government’s control over the economy. Why is the last bad? "Of course [society needs] a central decision maker who’s planning for the economy."

Underlying my professor’s logic against free trade is a common notion among today’s economists: while voluntary trade between individuals is beneficial to the parties involved (otherwise they wouldn’t trade) it is somehow harmful to the mysterious living, breathing entity known as "society." The connection between individuals and society is masked by enough politics and ethereal mathematics to keep an army of bureaucrats busy, but the conclusion is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Inevitably, the rights of the individual are sacrificed for some vague ideal known as the "social good," or in practice, the mooching pockets of a pull peddler.

Posted by: David

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