Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

Developmentally Disabled

Naturally, like all public spectacles, globalization is wrapped up in a huge amount of cant. For instance, if you are a poor country, you are supposed to take to the thing as eagerly as a diabetic to insulin. Now, if it was just a matter of freeing up trade between countries, we would nod our heads in agreement. The exchange of goods and services between people is, and always has been, a good thing. It is, so far as we can see, a far better way of getting what you want than hitting your fellow man over the head. But for it to really work, trade—like driving—needs a set of rules everyone follows; otherwise you are liable to crash or be run over.

And this is where it gets complicated. Because it turns out that many of the rules of global trade are set by the very people who are weighing down the market with all sorts of subsidies, sweetheart deals, perks, pork, and privileges, in the first place.

Take the World Bank, which is in the business of telling countries what they need to do to play the global trade game. In the lumpen imagination, the World Bank is not too different from the local neighborhood savings and loan—a kind of multicultural version of the friendly bank in It's a Wonderful Life. But the real World Bank is headed up not by Jimmy Stewart but by people like Paul Wolfowitz, a man whom his best friend wouldn't call a soft touch. Confirmed as the bank's boss in 2005, Wolfowitz immediately proclaimed he was on a mission of mercy:

“Helping the poorest ...