Paul Johnson has a few

Paul Johnson has a few in his most recent Forbes column. (registration required)

In economic activities the greatest of virtues is
tolerance. All societies flourish mightily when tolerance is the norm,
and our age furnishes many examples of this. China began its astounding
commercial and industrial takeoff only when Mao Zedong's odiously
intolerant form of communism was scrapped in favor of what might be
called totalitarian laissez-faire. {...}In the last fiscal year India's
GDP grew an estimated 8%, and in the third quarter, 10%. India's
economy for the first time is expanding faster than China's. For years
India was the tortoise, China the hare. The race is on, and my money's
on India, because freedom--of movement, speech, the media--is always an
economic asset. {...}The contrast between China and India--both moving
steadily to join the advanced countries of the world--and those
countries where Islam is dominant is marked. Whatever its merits may
be, Islam is not famed for tolerance. Indeed, of the major world
religions it is the least broad-minded and open to argument. With the
rise of a new form of fundamentalism in recent decades, its intolerance
has been growing--as has the concomitant poverty. {...}The more I study
history, the more I deplore the existence of those--be they clerics,
bureaucrats or politicians--who think they know what's best for
ordinary people and impose it on them. We have a pungent example of
this know-all mentality in the EU. The bureaucrats of Brussels have
created yet another brand of intolerance that determines by law
everything from the shape of bananas to the number of seats in a bus,
from apple growing to house plumbing. As a result the German economy is
contracting and the French economy is stagnant. There are now more
unemployed people in single-currency EU Europe than there have been at
any other time since the worst of the 1930s, and many of them will
never work again.

Go register and read the whole thing.
While I don't agree with Johnson's over-simplification of the economic
downfall of certain countries, namely Iran, as he seems to paint the
players in black and white with no shades of gray, he's got a point. A
very serious, yet a very simple point.

Posted by: Kathy at 12:42 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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