Many of you will have noticed that the site has been acting oddly since Friday. We’ve been having problems with our server configuration and unfortunately there has been some down time when the site was unavailable. I’m working on it and I apologize for the inconvenience.

Dear America,

The Pax Americana that has sheltered you from wars on your own soil has made you mind-numbingly stupid. So stupid, you are at war and don’t even know it.

Before we exchange the proven benefits of free markets for the Democrats’ promises of socialist utopia, it might be worth considering the things we’ll be giving up. My list follows. With what do you disagree? What would you add?

• Free markets have pulled billions of people out of extreme poverty. In just the last few decades, the lives of hundreds of millions of Asians – mostly in China and India – were significantly improved when their countries free up their economies.
• The environment in the capitalist west has improved significantly. Air and water quality are higher, and millions of acres of land have been reforested. The profit motive provides a strong incentive to use scarce resources to their best effect. Inefficiency is waste and waste is pollution.
• Water and sewage treatment technology, largely invented in the west, has significantly extended people’s lives – not just in the west but globally.
• Western medical breakthroughs, such as antibiotics, have also extended human lifespans globally.
• The Green Revolution – heavily backed by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and led by American agronomist Norman Borlaug – eliminated food shortages throughout the world. Today, famines are no longer caused by natural disasters but are almost exclusively man-made (see, for example, North Korea and Venezuela).
• Foreign trade has eliminated any excuse for imperialism. As Adam Smith observed in The Wealth of Nations, conquering and maintaining control over foreign territory cost far more than can ever be extracted from that territory. During Japan’s conquest of Southeast Asia, for example, the Japanese found that they received fewer goods from the conquered areas than they had previously gotten through trade. People don’t produce as much at the point of a bayonet as they do when they benefit by their production.
• Capitalism has raised women’s status to that of equality with men. In capitalist societies, brains are far more important than brawn, and women are more than capable of competing with men in that realm.
• Capitalism has largely eliminated the need for child labor. Child labor was a fact of life throughout most of human history. One man using a stick for a plow simply couldn’t produce enough food to feed a family. Children worked or they, and perhaps their families, starved. In the west, laws against child labor were passed only after the practice had all but ended.
• Children were exploited terribly in countries that tried to outlaw child labor before their people were productive enough to support so many idle hands (and mouths). Children still had to work to eat, but they had to do so surreptitiously without any protection from the law.
• Free markets have so increased human productivity that, in western countries, mere day-to-day survival is no longer the central focus of life.
• Innovation sparked by the profit motive has placed the world’s knowledge at our fingertips.

China already a serious strategic threat to the United States? If so, how should the United States respond to its rise as a regional and global power? In this Conversation, Aaron Friedberg, professor of political science and international affairs at Princeton University, argues that a rising China is now the most significant foreign policy challenge facing the United States. Reviewing recent history, Friedberg notes that America since the end of the Cold War has pursued a policy of greater engagement with China, believing that the country would ultimately liberalize politically. As Friedberg explains, this has not happened. Rather, the Chinese Communist Party has increasingly attempted to shape the world system in ways favorable to China and detrimental both to the security and economic well-being of the United States. Friedberg calls for economic, technological, and diplomatic efforts by the U.S. to meet the challenge from China.