Who will save the doggone Planet?

An Earth Summit is underway at the Michelangelo Hotel in Sandton City, a plush suburb of Johannesburg. Some 40,000 participants, including heads of states, will propose solutions for the ills of the planet, including poverty, the availability of clean water, better health, sustainable development, protection of the environment, conservation of biodiversity, and other such noble objectives, albeit unattainable. But no one expects any results beside an opportunity for political grandstanding, feel-good hot air, and the ingestion of delectable food ---lobster and foie gras---in a high-luxury setting. Our president, who has more important things to do, will not attend, which was roundly denounced as an affront by a mythical "world community" dear to the European press and other Marxist nostalgics.

Of course, Africa, the economic basket case of the world, is at the top of the agenda. On the opening day, Mr. Thabo Mbeki, South African president, spoke of a "world apartheid" separating the rich and the poor. Meanwhile, a singing and dancing crowd from neighboring slums marched on Sandton with banners or placards praising bin Laden, complaining about factory emissions, supporting Palestinian terrorists, opposing a US strike against Irak, and accusing Mr. Mbeki of genocide for not stopping the AIDS epidemic. And today, Mr. Mandela accused the US of lawlessness on the topic of Irak. Following Mr. Mandela’s speech, Mr. Chirac, president of France, declared that he entirely agreed with its contents, perhaps forgetting that barely a week earlier he had vowed to stop criticizing the US on this very subject.

Mr. Mandela’s outburst did not, however, mention the lawlessness pervading South Africa, which political correctness keeps attributing to poverty even though the connection between poverty and rape and murder is rather hard to comprehend. It did not mention either Mr. Mugabe’s insane policies that are destroying agricultural production in Zimbabwe, a country that used to export foodstuff to dependent neighbors. And it did not address the general corruption, ineptitude, and cruelty that characterize the rule of many African countries. Obviously, Africa waits for others to solve its self-created problems, and too many of these "others" pretend that they have the remedies. In particular, governments of the EU are dead set against solutions related in any way to the free market, which they call "profit for profit" and define as clashing with the preservation of the environment and principles of human solidarity and social justice---their own fuzzy buzzphrases. It apparently never occurred to them, informed as they are by socialist dogma, that profit and progress go hand in hand, one feeding the other. It is not by chance that the major discoveries that have benefitted the whole world have come from America, land of profit.

Among the unresolved questions on the summit agenda are the goals and target dates for the development of renewable energy sources, and an international poverty fund dedicated to the reduction of the income gap between rich and poor countries, which Europeans like to call the North and South, regardless of actual geographic location. Nations from Latin America pushed for a quadrupling of renewable energy sources (wind and solar) by 2010, which is costly, and of little impact as far as developing countries are concerned. The EU had a more modest but even more ineffectual compromise, which also allowed for the construction of big dams and for the high-pollution burning of dung and wood, which is purported to kill two million people each year---where do they get these figures? Predictably, that did not please the sophisticates of green disposition. Nevertheless, all agreed on advancing the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol as the panacea for our planet supposedly in peril, the absence of scientific evidence notwithstanding. As to the international Poverty Fund, the ineffable Mr. Chirac, true to his country’s tradition of statisr ingenuity, recommended an international tax instead of the principle of voluntary contribution likely to be adopted by the summit. Finally, a resolution concerning health drew heavy opposition from women’s groups for a clause stipulating that aid for health care would have to respect local customs. Well, in Moslem countries, the genital mutilation of women could be construed as an act of health care. Now, one could apply there the devious argument used by the same groups for the legalization of abortion, to wit, that the said mutilation, bad as it is, would not be as bad if performed in aseptic conditions by a qualified surgeon rather than by some old woman in a mud hut under the supervision of cockroaches. Of course, it make sense that we should be concerned that our money not be spent on imbecilic mutilations, voodoo medicine, and other cultural eccentricities.

Now, the biggest conundrum---also the theme of the summit---is that of a "sustainable development" plan for the whole world. This idea seems to have originated with one Ms. Gro Harlem Brundtland, MD, MPH, Director-General of the World Health Organization. She has a holistic vision of economic development that professes to optimize the world’s good with respect to environment, health, education, and standards of living. She defines "sustainable development" as providing for our current needs without compromising the capacity of future generations to provide for theirs. It is based on principles of social justice, human solidarity, and the solution of world problems by consensus under some higher authority---hers? Ms. Brundtland likes to suggest that "sustainable development" is the sine qua non of the Earth’s survival. She also considers herself as a moral voice for the world, which opposes free market ideologies and extols the virtues of "good and robust governance, effective and democratic institutions, and enlightened stewardship by the State." All this hubristic pap may be better understood from the knowledge that Ms. Brundtland has been a member of the Norwegian Labor Movement since age seven and has spent most of her adult life as a politician-cum-activist, including three stints at the head of Norway’s government. Her views are those of a statist---or super-statist---with powers of divination. How could she otherwise evaluate the capacity of future generations to provide for their needs?

A hundred years ago, the likes of Ms. Brundtland saw the future through a Marxist prism, and they were wrong. Fifty years ago, self-appointed futurists could not predict the advent of cheap computers able to perform hundred of millions of arithmetic operations per second at an energy cost comparable to that of a lightbulb, nor could they see their impact on science, technology, and world commonweal. Only twenty-five years ago, other charlatans with impressive academic titles forecasted short-term penuries of energy and water, and they were wrong. By hubris, or sheer stupidity, if not by intellectual dishonesty, these fakirs who preach state intervention to cure the world’s ills---the "enlightened stewardship by the State"---prefer to ignore that the most crucial element of progress is unfettered individual creativity and enterprise, not the dirigisme of "sustainable development."

The Johannesburg characters who call for a global war on poverty by wealth redistribution should take a good look at the American Great Society programs. They have failed. Mr. Chirac, who made that fatuous proposal for an international tax should know better. French policies aiming at reducing the gap between rich and poor by taxation have discouraged individual initiative, penalized success, encouraged sloth, and reduced the country into a state of drab mediocrity. Again and again, any government program designed to engineer a "classless" society only create an imperial, privileged governing class, self-protective, monopolistic, and bent on enforcing mediocrity. The Earth Summit’s global war on poverty will be no exception.

Mr. Bush’s absence from the Summit is the appropriate refusal to validate the authority of arrogant, unimaginative, self-anointed stewards of the world, and it should be applauded. Our history has shown over and over again that no human problem could not be solved with good faith and unfettered individual ingenuity. If the planet must be saved---should the need arise, which is unlikely---America will do it, not the Johannesburg "enlightened" lobster eaters with a socialist bent. Remember that we save the planet twice from communist and fascist depredations, an unmatched record.