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Is it ingratitude, or just selective amnesia?




Italy has a new emerging Leftist superstar they're calling the Italian Obama. He's gay, he's Catholic, and he's the governor of the southern region of Puglia. Despite all this, Nichola Vendola only caught my attention because of a short quote the BBC captured to give a sense of the flavor of his popular appeal:

"Today we have a globalisation of oligarchic and financial interests, but no globalisation of human rights and social rights.

"We have to fight for a globalisation of the people."

Of course, anyone with any sense of the history of human rights and social rights would find this statement completely ludicrous. Since the beginning of the American experiment of limited government where all are equal under the law, slavery has been abolished, almost all of the world's states have moved to democratic models for the selection of leaders, and the standard of living of even the poor in industrialized countries has been immeasurably advanced. Italy doesn't have a whole lot to complain about, and has benefited immensely by the advances in communications and travel technology that enable the ever more responsive movement and exploitation of capital we call globalization.

And even if one were to allow the premise that human rights and social rights are things that can be "globalized" in the same ways German cars can be sold in Italy and Italian cars can be sold in America, it still seems like a rather extreme case of forgetfulness to somehow suggest that the geopolitical and national forces which keep Italy, or any country, more honest than not in the rule of law doesn't derive in direct and indirect ways from globalization. Maybe it's not strategic amnesia. Maybe it's plain ingratitude. At least that way it makes sense alongside the rhetorical move of separating vague "oligarchic and financial interests" from those of the "people".

Of course, Vendola's idea of social rights is an untenable leftist notion that cannot co-exist in the same system where properly respected individual rights also exist, but even then, what does he think enables the cheap food he eats, the cheap fuel he uses, the cheap clothing he wears? More and more these cheap items are produced in places where workplace standards include benefits the early 20th century unionizers could scarcely dream of. When consumers have cheaper goods, their resources are more able to go to other productive uses, which in turn ends up providing more people with more fulfilled lives and potentially more purposeful pursuits.

Thanks America, for the idea of individual freedom, for the proof that capitalism permits the best distribution of capital possible, and for the geopolitical influence which has resulted in the saving of billions of lives and safe-guarding of untold freedoms.
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