Editorial

The Liberals' path to nowhere

If American liberals want to fight corporate control of the "homeland," they must lose their anti-business, anti-work, anti-responsibility, anti-development, anti-growth agenda that ignores the needs of working men and women around the world.

They are stuck in a rut of irrelevance, with one foot in the 1930s and the other in the 1960s. They mistake business for greed, but hatred of money leads only to poverty. Opposition to change itself, for the disruption it causes, is to oppose the inevitable and make one its victim.

Without business we don't eat. Without business we have more war, not less. Without business, women and children live closer to the line of starvation and abuse, because liberty and justice are only pursued when the belly is full and there is hope for the future.

Yes, Enron imploded under the sheer vastness of its greed and its rotting tentacles still reach deep into the White House. Yes, drug-makers are killing those who can't afford pills because senators on the take have extended their patents. Yes, coal-fired electricity monopolies are shifting the cost of pollution (and death) to those who breathe air.

But that happens in a democracy, where political power is for sale. The solution is not to destroy business or trade, but to make government more accountable to individual citizens, rather than huge corporations. Monopolies under government protection make everyone poorer and destroy liberty as a byproduct. They harm business as well.

But "Liberals" have taken that message one unfortunate step too far, that government should guarantee more than opportunity and protect individuals from their own poor choices.

Burning flags and shattering windows in the name of anti-globalization shows bigotry and ignorance of the laws of economics. It places principles over people.

The peasant making shoes in India should not starve because of his street address. A Chinese mother should not have to sell her children because she is not allowed to make shirts for American backs.

Those who say shoes and shirts for Americans should be made in America need to memorize the law of comparative advantage: Trade raises the standard of living of every trading partner. The opposite is also true: Isolationism, lack of trade, makes everyone poorer.

Yes, there is disruption in the life of the American textile worker who used to make Hathaway shirts. But we need to heal that disruption, not keep three Chinese families from making a living wage and Americans from buying a shirt they can afford.

There is also disruption in the life of a single mom working at a Starbucks destroyed by protesters in Seattle. There is disruption in the face of a logger whose chain bites into a spike in a legal timber sale.

"Liberals" often forget that working families may be either pro-life or pro-choice, but it is guaranteed that they care less about that than they do about their next pay check and the loss of insurance for their children.

The voices on the left need to shift focus and realize that trade pollinates hope and nurtures liberty. And not just in America.

Young Arab men, who have no job and no hope, spend their days listening to extremists who blame their plight on "The Great Satan." They, too, want their lives to have meaning, so they go to war. We call them terrorists, they call themselves warriors.

We should be buying cotton cloth, jeans, sandals and windbreakers from those young Arab men, snowboards and Subarus from the Chinese, sugar and caramel from the Cubans.

Trade needs to precede environmental protection in those countries, or women's rights. Not only are they too hungry to care, but American concepts of fairness and freedom are fairly new in the world. We cannot take our 250 years of unfinished experiment and shove them down the throat of peoples whose cultures and beliefs are thousands of years old. They have to ask, or they will hate us.

Business may focus on profit, but that is the proper role for business. It is the role of government, which too often fails, to bring social values to enterprise, to provide a fair and level playing field where business can thrive, consumers have choice, wages can be earned and children have an education that prepares them for the future.

That does not mean that government needs to be bigger, nor that it should protect individuals from their own bad decisions. Liberty also requires the risk of failure, and the welfare state stalls in the attempt to replace personal responsibility with public guarantees.

Liberals need to give up their opposition to business and their hidden indifference to people who make things. Above all, they must quit opposing change. We do not need typewriter repairmen any longer, or buggy whip makers.

The left should quit pretending that life would be better if we did.

E.D.