Reader Response from The Fray:
Chatterbox asks how anarchists came to favor statist trade regulations. The answer is that, by any reasonable historical or philosophical definition, the WTO and IMF/World Bank protesters aren't anarchists. Anarchism, in both its left and right ("anarcho-capitalist") incarnations, doesn't have much use for the World Bank, but it has even less use for wanton destruction of property and interference in innocents' lives. But the media, of course, is not interested in this kind of nitpicking. To them, anyone further right than Ted Kennedy is a reactionary McCarthyite dinosaur, and anyone further left (and who likes to destroy property) is an anarchist. The likes of Katie Couric and Peter Jennings are not interested in giving the impressionable public the idea that there are such things as extreme leftists. So, rather than call them such, better to reinvent a term that once had some meaning. As a corrective, I propose that journalists looking to convey the most meaning employ the phrase "left-wing extremists" when describing the protesters. Any takers?
--Ananda Gupta
(To reply, click here.)
Chatterbox is feeling punkish this morning, evidently. If the best response to clever humor that that Noah has is to call people Anarchists--where on earth did you get that from, pal?--you're 100 times worse than the Washington Lost editorial crew. Dumb dumb--really--get a head check. Unbelievable! Where did it say anything about anarchy!
--Hans Reimer
(To reply, click
here.)
On rereading the item, I see that I should have been clearer that the parody was put out by the World Bank/IMF protesters.
--Tim Noah
(To reply, click here.)
(4/13)
As the authors of the Washington Lost, we appreciate Timothy Noah taking the time to read what we wrote. It was cold Wednesday morning at 4 a.m. as we stood around deciding whether to go all the way out to Takoma Park, where Mr. Noah picked it up, and we're now glad we did.
We're sorry, of course, that Mr. Noah does not share our sense of humor. We thought that such headlines as "As Season Ends, Jordan Urges Wizards to Try Baseball" and "Fat America, Starving Africa Keep Humanity's Total Weight Unchanged" were pretty funny. But perhaps we are deceiving ourselves, and are unable to perceive that we are humorless pedants. In any case, by noon on Friday, readers with Adobe Acrobat can judge for themselves by checking out the Washington Lost at http://www.a16.org.
We are more dismayed that Mr. Noah seems to misunderstand the issues involved in the upcoming protests against the World Bank and IMF. Most important is the matter of what is generally called "free trade" and "protectionism." We would make two points about this.
1) The debate over globalization is generally portrayed as one between those who support free trade and those who support protectionism. This is inaccurate. There is no organized constituency anywhere that supports genuine free trade. Rather, this is a debate over what will be protected--the interests of the world's largest corporations and richest individuals, or those of regular people.
This may sound surprising, since people such as Mr. Noah constantly invoke their belief in what they call "free trade." However, it would be more accurate to describe their beliefs as "free trade for you, powerful government protection for me."
There are numerous examples of this. Take copyrights: copyrights are government-enforced monopolies on the production of certain products--in other words, protectionism. No one has demanded this government protection more vociferously than Microsoft, Mr. Noah's employer, both in America and elsewhere. (Indeed, one of Microsoft's keenest wishes has been to extend U.S. intellectual property rights laws to nations such as China, via the WTO.) There is a rationale for such government protectionism, of course. But then there is a rationale for other types of government protection as well (see #2, below). The more interesting question is why pundits like Mr. Noah are not as outraged about the types of protectionism that benefit them directly as they are about the forms of protectionism that do not.
Or take U.S. doctors. If the government removed the barriers to foreign doctors practicing in the U.S.--barriers created at the behest of domestic doctors--the supply of doctors would increase and the cost would decrease. If domestic doctors' salaries fell to the level of European doctors, U.S. consumers would save about $70 billion dollars per year. By contrast, the best estimates show that the lowering of tariffs in the Uruguay Round of the GATT saves U.S. consumers about $700 million per year. If the U.S. government is truly committed to free trade, why does it not devote 100 times as much time and energy to the issue of doctors salaries as they did to GATT? The answer, of course, is that doctors have the political muscle to get what the protection they demand. So why is this issue not a concern of Mr. Noah? Why has Mr. Noah probably never even thought about this until he read it here, right at this moment?
Or take the U.S. computer industry as a whole. No one would seriously argue that the computer industry, from the first computers to microchips to the Internet, has not been massively subsidized by the federal government. This continues today--the next generation of computers is largely being supported by grants from the Defense Department. This is exactly the type of government subsidy of industry that the IMF, World Bank, and WTO force other nations to eliminate. Why does Mr. Noah not advocate that the U.S. stop subsidizing the computer industry, and distribute much of his employer's profits to the citizens of the U.S., the people who made them possible?
The point we're making is that Mr. Noah's claim that he has a "distaste for protectionism" is comically inaccurate. In fact, if we read it in a parody of Slate we might be tempted to dismiss it as heavy-handed agitprop. Mr. Noah would be more accurate if he had stated that he shares "[Michael] Kinsley's distaste for protectionism that doesn't benefit us."
(Parenthetically, we are perplexed why it should be considered "heavy-handed agitprop" to quote something that Alexander Hamilton did, in fact, say. Is it heavy-handed agitprop to note that the favorite maxim of John Jay, president of the Continental Congress and the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, was "The people who own the country ought to govern it"? Is it agitprop to note that at in the Constitutional Convention in 1787, James Madison stressed that the primary function of government is "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority"? Perhaps Mr. Noah could supply a convenient list of which statements of the Founding Fathers are and are not appropriate to quote.)
2) No nation--not one--has ever successfully industrialized under the "free trade" conditions imposed on developing nations by the IMF, World Bank and WTO. This includes England, the United States, France, Germany, Japan and South Korea. Is it possible that perhaps, someday, some country will industrialize under these conditions? Perhaps. It is also possible that we, the authors of the Washington Lost, are going to jointly marry Madonna. We just wouldn't recommend that anyone sit around waiting for it to happen. Likewise, we don't recommend forcing other countries to do things we would never have accepted for ourselves. Here in America, we protected our infant industries, subsidized others, ignored intellectual property claims, and defaulted on our foreign debt more than once.
We agree with the evaluation of the current world economic system set forth by James Morgan, economics correspondent of the BBC World Service, in the Financial Times ("Rip van Winkle's New World Order," 4/25/92)--that we are in a "a new imperial age," one in which "a new global system is orchestrated by the Group of Seven, the IMF, the World Bank, and the GATT. ... this system has involved the integration of leaders of developing nations into the network of the new ruling class. ... A host of social instruments in these countries are organized by the new imperialists."
It is this new imperial system which the protestors involved in the upcoming demonstrations against the World Bank and IMF seek to dismantle.
In closing, we regret that this posting is so long and dry, but it apparently didn't work when we tried to make our points with jokes. Perhaps reasoned argument will work better.
One final matter: it is extremely strange to claim that the "anarchism [of the Marx brothers] lacked any political dimension," unless Groucho isn't considered part of the family. At a time when this posed a real risk to participants' careers, Groucho was a member of the "Committee for the First Amendment," which was established to counter attacks on Hollywood by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
In our story headlined "Study: Media Doesn't Trust Public," we wrote that "When asked to choose one word which best described Americans, 87% of the media picked 'ineducable.'" We hope that Mr. Noah's attitude doesn't indicate that he is part of this 87%. We also hope he has the humility to recognize that he may have some learning of his own to do.
If anyone would like a free paper version of the Washington Lost, please contact us at wpparody@yahoo.com.
--Authors of the Washington Lost
(To reply, click
here.)
Mr. Noah asks, "How did anarchists become advocates for statist restrictions on free trade?" An interesting answer to this question is provided in a collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky from Odonian Press titled The Common Good. Chomsky is speaking about a trip he had recently made to South America:
I met with a very lively anarchist movement in Buenos Aires, and with other anarchist groups as far away as northeast Brazil, where nobody even knew they existed. We had a lot of discussions about these matters. They recognize that they have to try to use the state--even though they regard it as totally illegitimate.
The reason is perfectly obvious. When you eliminate the one institutional structure in which people can participate to some extent--namely the government--you're simply handing over power to unaccountable private tyrannies that are much worse. So you have to make use of the state, all the time recognizing that you ultimately want to eliminate it.
Some of the rural workers in Brazil have an interesting slogan. They say their immediate task is "expanding the floor of the cage." They understand that they're trapped inside a cage, but realize that protecting it when it's under attack from even worse predators on the outside, and extending the limits of what the cage will allow, are both essential preliminaries to dismantling it. If they attack the cage directly when they're so vulnerable, they'll get murdered.
That's something that anyone ought to be able to understand who can keep two ideas in their head at once.
--Authors of the Washington Lost
(To reply, click here.)
(4/17)
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Reader Response from The Fray:
Chatterbox asks how anarchists came to favor statist trade regulations. The answer is that, by any reasonable historical or philosophical definition, the WTO and IMF/World Bank protesters aren't anarchists. Anarchism, in both its left and right ("anarcho-capitalist") incarnations, doesn't have much use for the World Bank, but it has even less use for wanton destruction of property and interference in innocents' lives. But the media, of course, is not interested in this kind of nitpicking. To them, anyone further right than Ted Kennedy is a reactionary McCarthyite dinosaur, and anyone further left (and who likes to destroy property) is an anarchist. The likes of Katie Couric and Peter Jennings are not interested in giving the impressionable public the idea that there are such things as extreme leftists. So, rather than call them such, better to reinvent a term that once had some meaning. As a corrective, I propose that journalists looking to convey the most meaning employ the phrase "left-wing extremists" when describing the protesters. Any takers?
--Ananda Gupta
(To reply, click here.)
Chatterbox is feeling punkish this morning, evidently. If the best response to clever humor that that Noah has is to call people Anarchists--where on earth did you get that from, pal?--you're 100 times worse than the Washington Lost editorial crew. Dumb dumb--really--get a head check. Unbelievable! Where did it say anything about anarchy!
--Hans Reimer
(To reply, click here.)
On rereading the item, I see that I should have been clearer that the parody was put out by the World Bank/IMF protesters.
--Tim Noah
(To reply, click here.)
(4/13)
As the authors of the Washington Lost, we appreciate Timothy Noah taking the time to read what we wrote. It was cold Wednesday morning at 4 a.m. as we stood around deciding whether to go all the way out to Takoma Park, where Mr. Noah picked it up, and we're now glad we did.
We're sorry, of course, that Mr. Noah does not share our sense of humor. We thought that such headlines as "As Season Ends, Jordan Urges Wizards to Try Baseball" and "Fat America, Starving Africa Keep Humanity's Total Weight Unchanged" were pretty funny. But perhaps we are deceiving ourselves, and are unable to perceive that we are humorless pedants. In any case, by noon on Friday, readers with Adobe Acrobat can judge for themselves by checking out the Washington Lost at http://www.a16.org.
We are more dismayed that Mr. Noah seems to misunderstand the issues involved in the upcoming protests against the World Bank and IMF. Most important is the matter of what is generally called "free trade" and "protectionism." We would make two points about this.
1) The debate over globalization is generally portrayed as one between those who support free trade and those who support protectionism. This is inaccurate. There is no organized constituency anywhere that supports genuine free trade. Rather, this is a debate over what will be protected--the interests of the world's largest corporations and richest individuals, or those of regular people.
This may sound surprising, since people such as Mr. Noah constantly invoke their belief in what they call "free trade." However, it would be more accurate to describe their beliefs as "free trade for you, powerful government protection for me."
There are numerous examples of this. Take copyrights: copyrights are government-enforced monopolies on the production of certain products--in other words, protectionism. No one has demanded this government protection more vociferously than Microsoft, Mr. Noah's employer, both in America and elsewhere. (Indeed, one of Microsoft's keenest wishes has been to extend U.S. intellectual property rights laws to nations such as China, via the WTO.) There is a rationale for such government protectionism, of course. But then there is a rationale for other types of government protection as well (see #2, below). The more interesting question is why pundits like Mr. Noah are not as outraged about the types of protectionism that benefit them directly as they are about the forms of protectionism that do not.
Or take U.S. doctors. If the government removed the barriers to foreign doctors practicing in the U.S.--barriers created at the behest of domestic doctors--the supply of doctors would increase and the cost would decrease. If domestic doctors' salaries fell to the level of European doctors, U.S. consumers would save about $70 billion dollars per year. By contrast, the best estimates show that the lowering of tariffs in the Uruguay Round of the GATT saves U.S. consumers about $700 million per year. If the U.S. government is truly committed to free trade, why does it not devote 100 times as much time and energy to the issue of doctors salaries as they did to GATT? The answer, of course, is that doctors have the political muscle to get what the protection they demand. So why is this issue not a concern of Mr. Noah? Why has Mr. Noah probably never even thought about this until he read it here, right at this moment?
Or take the U.S. computer industry as a whole. No one would seriously argue that the computer industry, from the first computers to microchips to the Internet, has not been massively subsidized by the federal government. This continues today--the next generation of computers is largely being supported by grants from the Defense Department. This is exactly the type of government subsidy of industry that the IMF, World Bank, and WTO force other nations to eliminate. Why does Mr. Noah not advocate that the U.S. stop subsidizing the computer industry, and distribute much of his employer's profits to the citizens of the U.S., the people who made them possible?
The point we're making is that Mr. Noah's claim that he has a "distaste for protectionism" is comically inaccurate. In fact, if we read it in a parody of Slate we might be tempted to dismiss it as heavy-handed agitprop. Mr. Noah would be more accurate if he had stated that he shares "[Michael] Kinsley's distaste for protectionism that doesn't benefit us."
(Parenthetically, we are perplexed why it should be considered "heavy-handed agitprop" to quote something that Alexander Hamilton did, in fact, say. Is it heavy-handed agitprop to note that the favorite maxim of John Jay, president of the Continental Congress and the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, was "The people who own the country ought to govern it"? Is it agitprop to note that at in the Constitutional Convention in 1787, James Madison stressed that the primary function of government is "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority"? Perhaps Mr. Noah could supply a convenient list of which statements of the Founding Fathers are and are not appropriate to quote.)
2) No nation--not one--has ever successfully industrialized under the "free trade" conditions imposed on developing nations by the IMF, World Bank and WTO. This includes England, the United States, France, Germany, Japan and South Korea. Is it possible that perhaps, someday, some country will industrialize under these conditions? Perhaps. It is also possible that we, the authors of the Washington Lost, are going to jointly marry Madonna. We just wouldn't recommend that anyone sit around waiting for it to happen. Likewise, we don't recommend forcing other countries to do things we would never have accepted for ourselves. Here in America, we protected our infant industries, subsidized others, ignored intellectual property claims, and defaulted on our foreign debt more than once.
We agree with the evaluation of the current world economic system set forth by James Morgan, economics correspondent of the BBC World Service, in the Financial Times ("Rip van Winkle's New World Order," 4/25/92)--that we are in a "a new imperial age," one in which "a new global system is orchestrated by the Group of Seven, the IMF, the World Bank, and the GATT. ... this system has involved the integration of leaders of developing nations into the network of the new ruling class. ... A host of social instruments in these countries are organized by the new imperialists."
It is this new imperial system which the protestors involved in the upcoming demonstrations against the World Bank and IMF seek to dismantle.
In closing, we regret that this posting is so long and dry, but it apparently didn't work when we tried to make our points with jokes. Perhaps reasoned argument will work better.
One final matter: it is extremely strange to claim that the "anarchism [of the Marx brothers] lacked any political dimension," unless Groucho isn't considered part of the family. At a time when this posed a real risk to participants' careers, Groucho was a member of the "Committee for the First Amendment," which was established to counter attacks on Hollywood by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
In our story headlined "Study: Media Doesn't Trust Public," we wrote that "When asked to choose one word which best described Americans, 87% of the media picked 'ineducable.'" We hope that Mr. Noah's attitude doesn't indicate that he is part of this 87%. We also hope he has the humility to recognize that he may have some learning of his own to do.
If anyone would like a free paper version of the Washington Lost, please contact us at wpparody@yahoo.com.
--Authors of the Washington Lost
(To reply, click here.)
Mr. Noah asks, "How did anarchists become advocates for statist restrictions on free trade?" An interesting answer to this question is provided in a collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky from Odonian Press titled The Common Good. Chomsky is speaking about a trip he had recently made to South America:
--Authors of the Washington Lost
(To reply, click here.)
(4/17)