FREE-MARKET CONSERVATISM--THE ANTI-RADICAL CHIC:

The New Radical Chic (Anne Applebaum, Sept. 11, 2003, Jewish World Review)

Last spring a 21-year-old French student named Sabine Herold stood up in front of 2,000 people and called on them to "take back the streets" from the strikers then blocking the Paris traffic.

Herold instantly became a counterculture heroine, hailed as the new Joan of Arc, admired for her daring and her chic. And she is not alone: Further north, a 30-year-old Swede with long blond hair has recently conquered Europe with a book called In Defense of Global Capitalism, just published here by the Cato Institute. Johan Norberg, a former anarchist who believes in a world without borders, makes the case that free trade is good for the developing world, good for freedom, good for social progress, even if the dull old Marxists refuse to see it.

It can be no accident that not one but two glamorous young pro-capitalists have emerged in Europe over the past year. In part, they may be another belated product of Sept. 11. Attendance at anti-globalization demonstrations dropped almost immediately after that date -- as if the game of political violence had suddenly become deeply unfunny. Recession has hurt the movement too: An economic downturn is bad for anti-globalist groups, which are dependent on the capitalist system not only for the computers they use to organize their protests and for the deregulated airlines they use to get there but for the funds, from individuals, corporations and even governments, that they live on.

Yet the shift in fashion also reflects a shifting intellectual consensus. Listen hard to Third World activists these days -- Oxfam, say, or the Jubilee Network -- and it is not anti-globalization rhetoric you hear but anti-trade-barrier rhetoric. In the run-up to Cancun, at least a half-dozen people have told me that the average European cow receives $2.50 in daily agricultural subsidies, more money than at least 3 billion of the world's humans have to live on. These agricultural subsidies are, without question, one of the least-discussed, farthest-reaching of international scandals: Every year, the rich world spends many billions more on subsidies and agricultural tariffs than it does on aid to the countries that these subsidies and agricultural tariffs help impoverish. Despite its traditional help-the-poor rhetoric, even Sweden, Norberg points out, makes sugar from sugar beets instead of importing sugar at a fifth of the price from the sugar cane-producing South.

It would be an exquisite harmonic convergence if the Free-Market Right could combine with the Left to get rid of Western farm subsidies. It's also rather unlikely.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 12, 2003 10:51 AM