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["clanSkeen" <sgian AT planetc.com>]

> From the article Gene forwards:

> Write this on your forehead: Free trade reduces world suffering.


Thanks for the article, Gene, but what it has to say is the biggest crock of 
BS I've heard in a long time.  Notice how many times in the article the word 
"growth" is used and how many times "sustainable" is used.  Also note:

" In 1990, there were roughly 472
million people in the East Asia and Pacific region living on less than $1 a
day. By 2001, there were 271 million living in extreme poverty, and by
2015, at current projections, there will only be 19 million people living
under those conditions."

What meaningless blather!  What did $1 buy there in 1990.  What does what 
they get today buy?  What are "those conditions"?

Did you ever see a version of Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days" with 
Pierce Brosnan?  He engages a steamship to get him from South America to 
Europe on the last leg of the journey and when the captain informs him that 
they must go slowly to conserve fuel, he buys the ship and has the crew 
break it apart and burn it to keep the steam up to gain a day or two in the 
race.  The sort of economists cited in the article are of that nature, they 
see only that the ship is going a little faster, not that what's going on is 
that we are persuading more and more of the world to adopt our 
Devil-may-care attitude about resources.

'Growth' occurs in this article so many times because the sort of economics 
on which it is based is like integral calculus - only able to quantify and 
deal with the acceleration in change and has no use whatever for something 
that is stable and sustainable.  We've been burning the candle at both ends 
and now we've lit it in the middle.

James