Zinn off the mark with ideas

If dissent is patriotic, Howard Zinn's lecture at the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre Friday was about as patriotic as it gets.\nAs expected, the event offered a predictable display of the anti-war, anti-corporate, anti-capitalist and anti-just-about-everything mentality embodied by today's extreme Left. A group of self-described progressive activists, their decidedly backward-looking, nihilistic agenda is as out of touch with reality today as ever.\nZinn and his followers have managed to construct a world view that is frighteningly inaccurate. The wealth of nations, they say, is becoming concentrated in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. The forces of globalization are destroying our natural resources, polluting our air and water and fueling an ever-accelerating worldwide race to the bottom. We now stand at the brink of disaster. Our only hope is to surrender our SUVs, crush the multinational corporations that are the root of all evil and become socialists. \nThis, of course, would be a sound course of action if any of these things were really true, but the evidence does not support their claims. While the rich have, indeed, been getting richer, the poor have been getting richer too. The poorest nations in the world are, on balance, less poor today than they were at the turn of the century.\nNew productivity and economic growth, ushered in by the Industrial Revolution and buttressed by recent technological advances, have created new wealth and raised living standards throughout the world.\nAs barriers to trade and investment have decreased more rapidly in the last decade, wealth and opportunity have expanded on an unprecedented scale. Those who have welcomed greater economic freedom and openness have benefited, while those who have resisted the change have suffered. Countries in East and Southeast Asia, which have embraced the global marketplace, have made great progress toward reducing poverty and expanding opportunity. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where trade and investment flow less freely, wide-spread poverty persists. \nDespite assertions that today's more open, integrated world economy has come at the expense of the environment and workers' rights, the U.S. and its European allies, which have the most open economies in the world, also have the most rigorous labor and environmental standards. In the United States, concentrations of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and other forms of air pollution have decreased dramatically over the past several decades. The workplace has never been safer. \nA similar trend is evident even in less-developed nations. A 1996 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) linked "successfully sustained trade reforms" to improvements in core labor standards. A 1997 World Bank study also found a strong correlation between higher occupational safety, health conditions and foreign direct investment. Environmental conditions are also improving in the developing world as multinational corporations export cleaner technology to their production facilities abroad in an effort to satisfy the concerns of more environmentally conscious U.S. and European consumers. The race to the bottom is actually a race to the top. Free trade and investment are now creating the resources necessary to more effectively combat already diminishing levels poverty throughout the world. Efforts to protect the environment and improve working conditions will only be strengthened as the forces of globalization continue to expand opportunity and hope to people and places in the future. \nFar from the downward spiral that leftist ideologues like Zinn represent, ours is a history of tremendous forward progress. There is still poverty and hopelessness that we have yet to overcome, but things are only getting better.