From the New York Times comes an interesting story about how the market liberalization of India is benefiting the lower castes, who have been spat on for countless generations.

When Chandra Bhan Prasad visits his ancestral village in these feudal badlands of northern India, he dispenses the following advice to his fellow untouchables: Get rid of your cattle, because the care of animals demands children’s labor. Invest in your children’s education instead of in jewelry or land. Cities are good for Dalit outcastes like us, and so is India’s new capitalism.

...

He has the zeal of an ideological convert: he used to be a Maoist revolutionary who, by his own admission, dressed badly, carried a pistol and recruited his people to kill their upper-caste landlords. He claims to have failed in that mission.

Mr. Prasad is a contrarian. He calls government welfare programs patronizing. He dismisses the countryside as a cesspool. Affirmative action is fine, in his view, but only to advance a small slice into the middle class, who can then act as role models. He calls English “the Dalit goddess,” able to liberate Dalits.

Along with India’s economic policies, once grounded in socialist ideals, Mr. Prasad has moved to the right. He is openly and mischievously contemptuous of leftists. “They have a hatred for those who are happy,” he said.

For the rest of the article, not to be accused of being pro-market, the New York Times reporter endeavors to prove that Mr. Prasad is completely full of shit.

From across India still come reports of brutality against untouchables trying to transcend their destiny.

It is a measure of the hardships of rural India that so many Dalits in recent years are migrating to cities for back-breaking, often unregulated jobs, and that those who remain in their villages consider sharecropping a step up from day labor.

Blah blah. Less of you, more of the plucky Prasad, who would probably feel right at home on the ASC forums.

Ok, so really it's only one reason that I'm going to write about here but I have two stories to tell.

First, a few months back I received an email from a Chinese businessman who lives and works in mainland China. I have been dealing with this man and the company that he represents for a couple of years now and most correspondence has been pretty typical. This email was different.

He was so excited to tell me, and probably countless other business acquaintances, about the birth of his first child, a beautiful little girl. I could sense his jubilation in the way that his already broken English seemed more broken than usual, as if he had written this message on the fly, perhaps writing from the hospital or in a stolen moment in the office before he rushed home to be with his newborn. And to top it off, this proud papa attached some absolutely adorable photos. (After seeing the photos I asked my wife if I could have a Chinese baby. She said, "NO".)

Though simple in nature, it was a remarkable experience for me and I was happy that he took the time to share his joy.

The second story I have to share happened just this week.

For the last few months my company has been doing business with a firm in Austria. They are building some custom machinery and tooling that we will be using in our factory. It is some really cutting edge stuff and we're excited to get our hands on it.

Last month a few of my coworkers went to Austria to test the equipment and to make the final arrangements. They had an amazing time. The Austrians were great hosts and spent a lot of time and effort entertaining our guys after hours. All had a great time and many alcoholic beverages were consumed.

Then, this week we finally received our shipment of tools and equipment from Austria. We were already excited to crack open the crates though we had no idea that the contents were far more pleasing than we imagined. As we looked into the open containers we found that our Austrian friends had taken great care in filling all of the empty spaces with milk crates full of beer.

This Friday, after work, we are going to have a beer fest and take lots of photos to send back across the puddle to our new best friends in Austria.

So, that is why I love international trade. It gives us the opportunity to see people from across the globe, not as scary and threatening foreigners who are a part of the monolithic "Chinese" or "Europeans", but as fellow humans, individuals, parents, children, businessmen, innovators, friends and drinking buddies.

At the urgent request of the Pentagon, scientists and engineers are rushing to create an artificial arm that works like a flesh-and-blood one for the growing number of soldiers who are losing their limbs in the Iraq war.

This will no doubt have some ignorants saying, "thank God for the Pentagon, now we have prosthetic limbs able to perform fine movements." Not to sound callous, but amputation and paralyzation are not common enough for the market to have decided that much more should be done above what has already been done. The allocation of what will no doubt be an astounding number of millions of dollars in research money could have been spent on something more in demand/efficient.

By the way, the similarity between the argument for government-funded research and the arguments used to show the existence of the free rider problem is impossible to ignore.

I recently had a conversation with my dad where he opined authoritatively that China's boom would bust because its environment was being despoiled so quickly. I said, uh, European and American cities were putrid balls of toxins during the Industrial Revolution. Then advances came about that fixed most of the problems. The same will happen in China.

So today I come across an article in the London Times about New Year's rice dumplings.

"Ms Wang was happy to queue because she was confident a well-known shop would not try to flout food safety rules, a big temptation in get-rich-quick China."

Hm. It seems the market is on its way to taking care of bad food in China.

"Mr Jiao sold about 70 tonnes of yuanxiao this year — that is 4.2 million rice balls. He boasts that his rice powder taps into a new-found environmental awareness among Chinese consumers. The grains are soaked for five hours and ground for 24 hours in traditional stone mills. Everything is hand-made. His customers seem appreciative. “I prefer to buy ‘green’ food,” one shopper said."

Hm. It seems the market is taking care of bad environmental practices in China.

A mere two months after taking a courageous stand in favor of a minimum wage hike for other people's workers along with their own, Wal-Mart workers have taken a courageous stand in favor of irony: an Oakland, California jury yesterday found Wal-Mart liable for $172 million in compensatory and punitive damages for not providing their workers with state-mandated lunch breaks.

The issue is multi-layered for the private sector proponent: on the surface, it looks like yet another case of a state regulation clashing with market efficiency. Complicating the matter: Wal-mart, even as corporations go, are perfect bastards, from their estimated $1.5 billion in subsidies and property tax abatements to their preference for factories in union-prohibitive countries and notorious eminent domain abuse. Wal-Mart's libertarian apologists have their hands full defending their precious corporation as a business proper when the company behaves as though they'd prefer hefty regulation over light. The rest of us are left to ponder whether to just throw up our hands and write off the whole matter as a case of roundabout just desserts.

The only reason I go to the Washington Times is for work, I wouldn't touch that moonie rag otherwise. The mark of a good right-wing nutball crackpot website is the slightly fuzzy, poorly-designed ads for sites about using your own body weight to get in shape, sites that teach you unconventional self-defense techniques even weirder than Krav Maga, and sites that sell all kind of coins as long as they're gold. One of these ads recently was for Stand Up For Steel, a coalition of various steel unions pushing for the government to subsidize their vocations by forcing the rest of us to buy the ridiculously expensive product they produce when we can get it dirt cheap from China and elsewhere.

What is it about unions that make them so untouchable? Why are they allowed to constantly threaten and impoverish us with violence and protectionism? This supposedly capitalist country is held in thrall by these dirtbags who are too lazy to educate themselves in something useful, a service people actually want them to perform instead of one people are forced to pay them to perform. Why don't they abandon America's Butthole and move to more vibrant places like China or India? After all, their ancestors moved to the US from Europe. I know a lot of people want to believe it but the United States is not the end of history. If toiling in filth is their raison d'être, let the comfy workers ship their F-350s to Asia and get a job there. They can bang on all the steel they want for $1.50 a day.

Something tells me that if the US cast off that filthy frozen pit called Michigan, all our problems would be solved. Send the rest of the Rust Belt with it into economic oblivion. Fuck it, flush the Flyover down the toilet altogether. The coasts are the regions that run this show. Let the middle of the country join Angola in an economic union, they have just about the same GDP.

MRE's for sale!

In the aftermath of this year's devastating hurricane season there is, yet another, valuable lesson to be learned.

The lesson: Markets will and do develop in spite of government rationing.

Just as markets developed in the former Soviet Union amongst individuals who traded the goods they were rationed for the goods they preferred, so also, markets have been formed for buying and selling the goods that have been rationed, by the state, to this year's hurricane victims. Big surprise.

Markets can’t be stopped. Furthermore, as is beautifully demonstrated in the case of the eBay MRE’s, modern technology makes it that much easier to circumvent the state and for markets to thrive.