SACRAMENTO, CA - The recent protests against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund posed problems for embattled D.C. police and served up exciting footage for the evening news. The noisy scrum in the nation's capital also provided the public and policymakers with valuable educational benefits about the media and the protesters.

The protestors represent the Left, though no one would ever know it from the American media, which divide
everything into "right wing" and "moderates", which the D.C. protesters were not.

They are the Luddite Left, a loose coalition of nostalgic Old Left types, fundamentalist pantheists,
environmental activists, union militants, soi-disant "progressives," victims of public education who think
that anarchism means that you smash things, general grievance-mongers with nothing better to do, and
twenty-somethings who get their ideas from MTV, think Dan Rather is "deep," and just want to make new
friends. What unites this squad is the ability to examine the record of the past century and proclaim
capitalism to be an evil.

Notice that, aside from a few True Believers, the protestors do not proclaim that capitalism is dead and
socialism is the wave of the future. Not even the infantile Left can do that with a straight face.
Socialism, after all, is the grand failure of our time, perhaps of all time given its grandiose prophecies.

That failure has left the Left in a completely negative position, with no agenda, and nothing to do but
demonize the free market. The free market, of course, is not the same as the International Monetary Fund and
World Bank, which have their problems and are certainly deserving of criticism. These very organizations,
particularly the IMF, are huge bureaucracies that have forced some very foolish policies onto developing
nations. But it doesn't follow that capitalism and the free market are evil, and cause poverty. Here, in
classic fashion, the Left asks the wrong question.

For most of history, poverty has been the natural condition of humankind. The true question is "What
causes wealth?" That is, what political, economic and social arrangements help people to lift themselves from
poverty. The answer is evident to all but the willfully blind. A market economy, a democratic political system,
and a pluralistic culture are the most productive arrangements in history, still sought out by immigrants
from around the world, many of them fleeing the wreckage of socialism.

Access to American markets would help many in the developing world. But access to American markets,
technology, and capital is precisely what the D.C. protesters, particularly the union people, want to
prevent. Likewise, affluent American environmentalists, who want both to retain their affluence and impose
their restrictive agenda on the developing world, should be seen as the modern purveyors of imperialism.
That is how many in the Third World do in fact see them.

The Luddite and protectionist Left retains its fondness for political theater, but arguments do not gain
validity by being repeated at high volume in front of TV cameras. When the shouting is over, the free market
will remain the best vehicle for those individuals or nations seeking to lift themselves from poverty. And
those trying to block that process will still be protectionists, Luddites, and reactionaries, even if
the media describe them as advocates of "peace and justice causes."

--K. Lloyd Billingsley