I'm boycotting Brazil nuts.
The top nut in Brazil, Brazil's president Luiz Inacio Lula da
Silvamade (big enough to be known simply as Lula, like Beyonce or
Madonna) told British Prime Minister Gordon Brown that the
world's current economic crisis was caused by "white people with
blue eyes."
Waving his finger at Brown, Lula, a socialist, said that people
in poor countries shouldn't have to pay for the mistakes of
people in rich countries. "It is a crisis caused and encouraged
by the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes," he
said, "who before the crisis appeared to know everything, but are
now showing that they know nothing.."
As a pro-capitalist white guy with blue eyes, I should sue. Isn't
it illegal to generalize about eye color and economic ignorance?
Isn't there some U.N. declaration that says it's a crime against
humanity to openly and publicly link skin color with things like
a propensity to approve bad loans or accumulate toxic assets?
And why aren't the blue-eyed a protected minority? We're only
eight percent of the world's population --- and shrinking, as we
continue to be less prolific in breeding than the brown-eyed
(which doesn't bode well for the future, given that Louisville
University professor Joanna Rowe's research shows that the
blue-eyed are better skilled at planning and more
accomplished in academic achievements).
In any case, seeking to internationally spread the wealth, Lula
added, "I do not know any black or indigenous bankers, so I can
only say it's wrong that this part of mankind, victimized more
than any other, should pay for the crisis." That doesn't mean, of
course, that indigenous bankers don't exist or that they're any
less crooked, just because Lula doesn't know any.
Piling on, the New York Times ran this headline in its
"Week in Review" section three days after Lula went after the
world's blue-eyed money-grubbers: "G20 --- English-speaking
Capitalism On Trial."
And so I'm guilty on all four counts -- an English-speaking
white capitalist with blue eyes.
Well, two can play that game. If they want to link eye color and
language to economic performance, how about the economic success
(or lack thereof) of Spanish-speaking Fidel, the longest-running
brown-eyed collectivist in Lula's hemisphere?
With a per capita income equal to Italy in 1959, Cuba was the
fourth richest nation in Latin America when Castro shot his way
into power. Today, after a half century of anti-capitalism, Cuba
is the fifth poorest, even with brown-eyed leadership and
after being on the receiving end of Soviet welfare for over two
decades.
"Castroite Cuba emerged from this Soviet largesse with among the
lowest per capita incomes in the hemisphere," writes
Cuban-American author Humberto Fontova, "a lower credit rating
than Somalia, fewer phones per capita than Papua New Guinea,
fewer internet connections than Uganda, and 20 percent of her
population gone -- all at total cost of their property and many
at extreme cost to life and limb."
Readers of the New York Times might be excused for not seeing the
political and economic disaster that was on the horizon when
Castro was organizing his revolutionary coup in the hills. "Fidel
Castro has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice,
the need to restore the Constitution," reported Times
correspondent Herbert Matthews in February 1957 as Castro was
beginning his two-year march on Havana. "The program is vague and
couched in generalities," wrote Matthews, "but it amounts to a
new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic and therefore
anti-Communist."
To be fair to Matthews, he was wrong about Castro intending to
deliver an anti-communist new deal, but he was right about Castro
having "strong ideas" about liberty and democracy -- he was
against both.
For another failed model of brown-eyed anti-capitalism, Lula and
the Times might want to take a look at Tanzania. From
independence in 1961 until the mid-1980s, Julius Nyerere
decimated Tanzania's economy through a combination one-party rule
and a socialist model of economic development.
The Bureau of African Affairs at the U.S. Department of State
lists Tanzania's natural resources: "Hydroelectric potential,
coal, iron, gemstones, gold, natural gas, nickel, diamonds, crude
oil potential, forest products, wildlife, fisheries."
None of those natural assets much matter, however, when
brown-eyed central planners destroy individual incentives and
undercut development by way of despotism and anti-capitalism.
Today, after its ambitions for independence and prosperity were
undermined by over two decades of Nyerere's anti-business
destruction, Tanzania ranks at the bottom of the U.N. Human
Development Index. Life expectancy is 50, the economy is
overwhelmingly donor-dependent, and per capita income is $1.10
per day -- all without any blue-eyed devils running the
show.
