Infantile, bogus anti-corporatism.

The Mr. Perkins below is one John Perkins, "a frothing conspiracy theorist, a vainglorious peddler of nonsense, and [author of], 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,' . . . a runaway best seller."

Mr. Perkins likes to invoke Indonesia, the scene of his first hit-man assignment [to enslave the poorest countries]. The way he tells it, the development economists who persuaded Indonesia to borrow money around 1970 were peddling a ludicrous idea -- that Indonesia's economy could spring from the dark age to the modern age in a mere generation. Well, Indonesia's infant mortality and adult illiteracy rates each fell by two-thirds over the next three decades, and life expectancy shot up by 19 years.

The same point holds for the developing world generally. The adult illiteracy rate in the poor world was halved between 1970 and 2000, and since 1980 the number of people living on less than $1 a day has fallen by about 200 million, even as the world's population has expanded rapidly. That is a stunning achievement given that the ranks of the poor had previously been swelling steadily, at least since 1820.

The poor have made these gains because Mr. Perkins's second contention is equally wrong: The corporatocracy is neither evil nor omnipotent. Survey after survey has shown that the multinational companies vilified by Mr. Perkins pay better wages than their local rivals in poor countries: One study of 20,000 Indonesian manufacturing plants found that the average pay in foreign-owned factories was 50% higher than in local ones -- and also that foreign competition pushed local wages upward.

Never let facts get in your way.

"Reality Takes The 'Hit' From These Confessions." By Sebastian Mallaby, Wall Street Journal, 3/1/06 (subscribers only).