This year, protestors in Rostock, Germany, were so enthusiastic that they demonstrated against the G8 Summit before it began.
Dozens of impatient groups took part, including communists, anarchists and environmentalists, whose goals were as mixed as their makeup.
But one protestor summed up the core of their anti-globalization gaggle: "They want to impose their wills upon the poor nations."
Apparently, the demonstrators insist that countries have a right to live outside of the international economic system - a goal that might alternately be described as the freedom to remain impoverished.
Capitalism does at least one thing right, which communism, which delights in cronyism, usually doesn't: it seeks out cheap labor wherever it can find it. The process actually doesn't just exploit poor people; it creates jobs in the poorest areas of the globe, illuminates the first stirrings of hope, and lowers, among other things, the price of sneakers.
The more immediate problem of many impoverished nations is that they do not have governments stable enough to attract international capital or a workforce educated enough to take on more than the most basic kinds of employment.
These are tractable obstacles to human progress, health, and happiness against which idealists might more productively devote their enthusiasm.
It would also be reassuring if the demonstrators, heartfelt and noble as their intentions may be, grasped the irony of their situation. They can afford to dress, have breakfast, and take time off to demonstrate against the group that most represents human prosperity and the only real hope of spreading it, while the wretched of the earth can only sit in their mud huts, naked, and starve, with no employment to take a day off from.
The fact is that the precondition of global prosperity is a global system that can enable it. Faulty and stumbling as it may be, at least one exists.
And the impoverished of the earth's only real hope is that the global economic system will arrive in their part of the world with the undervalued enabler known as paying employment, along with the usual things the inhabitants of prosperous nations get to complain about, like an unappreciative boss, a smaller-than-expected bonus, and inadequate vacation time.
About Author :
Tom Attea, humorist and creator of NewsLaugh.com, has had six shows produced Off-Broadway. Critics have called his writing "delightfully funny," "witty," with "good, genuine laughs" and "great humor and ebullience."
