Dope

Wow. I love the New York Times Business section. The echt biz columnists are always sharp. But they opinion columnists, people like Virginia Postrel, are the red meat type - the kind that want to contractualize every pee. Today it is somebody named Daniel Akst - In Genoa's Noise, a Trumpet for Capitalism - who resurrects a trope last heard during the Vietnam war - that the protests against the G8 are staged by the spoiled children of the G8 who have just benefitted immensely from it all. Much like the protesters against the Vietnam war who a. didn't understand it and b. benefitted from America's robust, Bomber backed committment to freedom, longhaired punks that they were, and were trying to block the good fight with a lot of weepy-washy malarky about napalming children. Look, those children were dangerous! the Aksts of the world point out, being rational souls.

Well, there is one telling difference. Akst avoids saying that the protestors are smelly - among conservatives, the realization has slowly set in that the weapon of fashion is probably not the best stick in the house. It turned out that the hippies were fashionable - and lived to profit from it. So who knows - globo-protest chic might have some bucks in it. So don't knock it. Akst takes another tact - he claims they are beautiful but oh so, like, stupid - while the G8, the WTO, and others are working day and night to put "food on the tables in houses from Bolivia to Bangladesh," the young and restless out on the barricades are pretending like they have a right to have a say in it all. Ignorant ragamuffins! My god, the unmitigated gall. And hey, pay no attention to those pesky statistics that suggest that the share of wealth going to Bolivia and Bangladesh, since the advent of more robust freetradin', has gone down - although it has. Pay no attention to the difference between the economic behavior of a country like the US - which found it convenient, in the 80s, to finance its growth with massive deficit financing - and, say, Argentina, which is being poleaxed because of its deficit financing. Yes, to minds that aren't as, well, subtle as Akst (genius that he appears to be in this article) that might suggest economic policies in less wealthy countries have to encounter different international restraints, and thus might follow different internal courses, such as finding a more interventionist role for the state in supporting enterprises. And to minds less attuned to democratic theory than Akst, it might appear a little suspicious to have these multi-national organizations unilaterally changing domestic law in various countries, according corporations a more than equal legal status.

But heck - who said anything about democracy? Here's the killer graf from Akst's vile little column:
"That is why, young and handsome and idealistic as these protesters so often are, it is important to crush them � figuratively, of course � if they won't go home and find other means of exorcising their great guilt at their own good fortune. You may not like the collection of aging white men who, thanks in part to the power of corporations, lead the world's richest nations. But for all their flaws, the economic vision they represent is infinitely more plausible and more humane than the one their critics appear unable even to articulate."
Ah, figuratively crush them - like the cops were doing all over Genoa! Isn't that precious? The wording is so... well, it is so reminiscent of certain, shall we say, authoritarian regimes - Pinochet's comes to mind, as well as the dirty little junta in Argentina. The crushing metaphor is really what is behind the smiley face of the G8 leaders . Meanwhile we can liquidate those "subsistence farmers" in the third world that lead such crushingly poor lives, as Akst suggests, and send them off happily into cities, where they can die of various diseases for which cures have been found but, alas, patented beyond the pocketbooks of the third world (and by the way - crush those Thai companies that infringe on our godgiven patent law, too!), or drink the wonderfully unfiltered water, or live in wonderfully deconstructed kin patterns in wonderful brick and mortar burnouts in, say, Kampala. It is all to the greater glory of private initiative! And a lot of those poor, too, can be properly inducted into the sweatshop ethos, a much better way to take up 14 hours of their day than futile village pranks. This is civilization, after all. The rest can become what Thomas Friedman, another globo-advocate, calls "turtles" - you know, losers in the race for wealth. They can always steal.
Akst might be happy to know that in Brazilian cities, police are often hired to crush the "young and handsome and idealistic" - well, not so idealistic, and often rather scabby - by simply massacring them.
I am suprised that the headline writer for Akst piece didn't take advantage of his opportunity, though - given the tough love nature of the article. He should have headlined it: Exterminate the brutes.