Paul Johnson has a few in his most recent Forbes column. (registration required)
In economic activities the greatest of virtues is tolerance. All societies flourish mightily when tolerance is the norm, and our age furnishes many examples of this. China began its astounding commercial and industrial takeoff only when Mao Zedong's odiously intolerant form of communism was scrapped in favor of what might be called totalitarian laissez-faire. {...}In the last fiscal year India's GDP grew an estimated 8%, and in the third quarter, 10%. India's economy for the first time is expanding faster than China's. For years India was the tortoise, China the hare. The race is on, and my money's on India, because freedom--of movement, speech, the media--is always an economic asset. {...}The contrast between China and India--both moving steadily to join the advanced countries of the world--and those countries where Islam is dominant is marked. Whatever its merits may be, Islam is not famed for tolerance. Indeed, of the major world religions it is the least broad-minded and open to argument. With the rise of a new form of fundamentalism in recent decades, its intolerance has been growing--as has the concomitant poverty. {...}The more I study history, the more I deplore the existence of those--be they clerics, bureaucrats or politicians--who think they know what's best for ordinary people and impose it on them. We have a pungent example of this know-all mentality in the EU. The bureaucrats of Brussels have created yet another brand of intolerance that determines by law everything from the shape of bananas to the number of seats in a bus, from apple growing to house plumbing. As a result the German economy is contracting and the French economy is stagnant. There are now more unemployed people in single-currency EU Europe than there have been at any other time since the worst of the 1930s, and many of them will never work again.Go register and read the whole thing. While I don't agree with Johnson's over-simplification of the economic downfall of certain countries, namely Iran, as he seems to paint the players in black and white with no shades of gray, he's got a point. A very serious, yet a very simple point. Posted by Kathy at June 1, 2004 12:42 PM | TrackBack