Acton Institute PowerBlog - Entries from Thursday, July 31, 2008

The Business and Media Institute highlights House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s response to a question about why conservatives and advocates for the free market degrade San Francisco as a city out of step with mainstream America. Pelosi believes it’s all about economics, and she points to the fact that government regulation and government programs in San Francisco are the model for America, and advocates for free markets are afraid of other citizens recognizing that. Pelosi says:

In San Francisco, every child has health care until 25 years old. In San Francisco, we don’t have a minimum wage, we have a living wage. In San Francisco, the environment is not an issue for us, it is a value. It is an ethic – it is protecting God’s creation. And so the exploiters of nature, of workers and the rest – like to use other aspects of our lives, which we take great pride in.

Pelosi goes on to note that conservatives try to use social and traditional values as a wedge issue to stop the spread of San Francisco’s economic values across America. She seems to be expressing the view that San Francisco is the new “city upon a hill.”

But are loss of economic freedoms and increased regulations in San Francisco a beneficial economic policy for all of America’s businesses and citizens? San Francisco’s mayor has also gone after bottled water. What about the city’s recent treatment of the U.S. Marines? Thomas Sowell does a good job explaining the reason for amazingly high housing prices in San Francisco because of increased government environmental regulations.

San Francisco is a beautiful city with many great citizens, but their economic policies are certainly not a shining example for all of America to follow. The Speaker’s comments however are a reminder of the need for free market advocates to do a better job in articulating the moral value and benefits behind their own ideas. If the arguments against San Francisco are led by people who may primarily be interested in social issues, there is merit of course, but the argument against exporting San Francisco values are incomplete.

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes a public claim it’s typically controversial. So the AP filed a story with this headline in the Jersualem Post, “Ahmadinejad blames West for AIDS.” Clearly the JP went for shock value, as most other outlets chose to title the story something like, “Iranian president: ‘Big powers’ going down.”

But there it is among a bunch of other accusations that Ahmadinejad leveled at a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). According to the AP, “Ahmadinejad’s keynote speech was tailored to reflect the struggle that some NAM members see themselves in against the world’s rich and powerful countries.”

The AIDS claim is just one among many used to drive a wedge between developed and developing nations, blaming the former for the ills of the latter. But Ahmadinejad’s participation in this global blame game is part-and-parcel of what’s been going on for years.

In 2003, for instance, the proceedings of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches’ global south-south Buenos Aires conference observed that “economic globalization has created job loss and grinding poverty, an unprecedented rise in crime and violence, ecological degradation, and the spread of HIV/Aids.”

As a piece I co-wrote wondered at the time,

Just how does a system of economic exchange “cause” the spread of HIV? The only evidence offered by the ecumenists from Geneva is that “the effects of the free market system on the HIV/Aids pandemic are evident in the management and treatment of the disease.The policies and practices of transnational pharmaceutical companies have privileged profits over the health of people, and the high cost of HIV/Aids drugs and trade agreements exclude the poor from the effective treatment and prevention from infection.”

When Ahmadinejad blames AIDS on the West, he’s a pariah. But when the ecumenical movement says it, they’re seen as speaking truth to power.