Lifting Up The Downtrodden
By Margaret Snyder (10/31/04)
An economics professor I know was discussing his experiences living and studying in India in the early 1970s. A year after graduating from college he set out to travel around the world, at a leisurely pace, planning to stop and work as needed. As it turned out, his travels stopped when he reached India and he stayed there a few years.
That gave him time to observe Indian society at close range. He saw poverty but he also saw, in the rural area where he lived, a vibrant local economy of small entrepreneurs and farmers. In the cities, he saw the frustrations of people trying to get things done through the corrupt bureaucracy in a country where state planning was the working model. He concluded that what these people needed was: a free-market economy.
I was amazed to hear him say this because at about the same time, I had seen third-world poverty and assumed that what these people needed was: more foreign aid from the United States. Probably my reaction was the more typical.
A just released movie produced by Robert Redford tells of another middle-class young man, from Argentina rather than from the United States, fresh out of university in the early 1950s, who also set out on a journey to see the world, or at least the vast continent of South America. He was, of course, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. When Che found poverty and injustice in the third world, he concluded that what these people needed was: a Marxist revolution.
Che got his revolution, in Cuba, and today poverty and oppression continue to prevail in Cuba.
India, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, ousted the Congress Party and moved toward less state regulation of economic life and so unleashed creative energies resulting in a rapidly improving standard of living.
Marxist revolutionaries make great film subjects, mainly because today’s movie-making left still believes deep down that Marxism, if it were just done right, would be the salvation of mankind. If only Che had lived, they believe, maybe things would be different. Of course, if Che had escaped violent death in Bolivia, he would either have become a brutal dictator or been killed by one (Castro does not share power well). But now Che is a romantic figure, full of righteous indignation and a dream of lifting up the downtrodden.
A colleague forwarded to me a review of the Che movie with the suggestion that perhaps I would want to take some of my Spanish students to see it. I doubt she would understand that I would no sooner do that than I would take them to see an adoring movie about the young Stalin or the young Hitler and how they really meant well. Socialism, national or international, is an ideology flawed from the start.
Happily, socialists aren’t the only ones who dream of lifting up the downtrodden. So did my acquaintance, the economist, and other economists such as Milton Friedman. These people dreamed of making the world a better place by introducing free-market economies where there were none. And here’s the thing: they actually succeeded. Such prosperity as we find in formerly third-world countries today, from India to Chile, is largely the result of the application of the ideas of Milton Friedman and other free-market economists. And much of the misery, from North Korea to Tanzania, is the result of someone’s following the socialist dream.
Who actually helped the downtrodden? It’s not hard to see, but don’t expect Robert Redford to produce a movie about Milton Friedman any time soon.
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