You’ve likely heard economics described as the “dismal science.”
News Corporation Vice President William McGurn disagrees with that notion. He explained why during a speech last month at Hillsdale College that has been transcribed for the latest edition of Imprimis. McGurn says “when it comes to seeing the potential in even the most desperate citizens of this earth, our economists, business leaders, and champions of a commercial republic are often far ahead of our progressives, artists, and humanitarians.”
So here’s a question. What happens when you think that the cause of a nation’s poverty is not too much government in the market but not enough government control over how many children a couple will have?
In China it led to forced abortions and a birth rate wildly skewed against baby girls.
In India in the mid-1970s, it led to a mass campaign of assembly-line sterilizations. So brutal was the policy, it provoked a backlash that brought down Indira Gandhi’s government the following year.
In South Africa and Namibia, it led to policies that appeared to target the part of the population least able to defend itself. Young black women were given contraceptive injections without their consent—not infrequently right after the birth of their first child.
In short, from Peru to the Philippines, innocent men and women were subjected to outrages all based on the assumption that our new humanitarians shared with Mr. Carlyle: the need for a beneficent whip.
And who were the voices of protest? Who reminded the experts and self-styled humanitarians that human beings flourish in liberty and languish when they are treated like chattel? Who argued that the way to help the world’s poor was not to tell them that their babies are a burden, but to tear down government barriers preventing them from taking their rightful place in the global economy?
The answer is: the economists.
