HISTORY SHOWS UP GREENIE ECONOMIC ILLITERACY

A decade ago, a report from the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington-based environmental research group, set off a firestorm in Beijing. Chinese imports were rising after a series of lackluster harvests and Worldwatch predicted that China's demand would suck up a huge amount of the world's wheat and other grains, forcing up prices.

Does anybody make more wrong predictions than the Worldwatch Institute? It keeps predicting that we're going to run out of food, water, energy, and other resources, and we keep not running out. Yet every year journalists solemnly report its annual predictions. Anyway, China didn't suck up the world's wheat and prices didn't rise.

Free-market reforms in the late 1970s allowed a return to household farming. National wheat production began to soar as farmers were able to buy chemical fertilizers and new seed strains. The Chen family's harvests have increased seven-fold since China's market reforms.

Instead, starting with Deng Xiaoping's reforms after the death of Mao, Chinese agricultural production soared -- so much so that peasants began leaving the farms, going to the cities, looking for jobs, and setting up enterprises. Despite his Communist Party years, Deng may have done more good for more people than anybody else in history. Thanks to his reforms, over a billion people can now not only feed themselves but export food and shift labor to more productive uses.

The positive-sum character of trade is the very foundation of the liberal world order, the underpinning of expanding trade, international harmony, and peace. If one country's success was another's woe, then the socialists and nationalists would be right: World trade would be a war of all against all. Thankfully, they're wrong. The growing productivity of China, Russia, and India is wonderful news for their two billion citizens and good news for everyone else in the world economy as well.

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HYPOCRITICAL ALASKAN GREENIES

Do as I say, not as I do: "State environmental officials say the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise broke Alaska law by not filing an oil spill response plan or having a certificate of financial responsibility. The ship was ordered to anchor until both requirements are met, said Department of Environmental Conservation spokeswoman Lynda Giguere. An investigation is being conducted to decide whether a fine will be levied, she said."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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