Postwatchers: Evil Capitalism

Postwatchers is a new regular feature consisting of quick links and occasionally quick commentary on comments by others in the blogosphere about the Washington Post. There's a lot of it out there--the poor Washington Post is like a frontier outpost surrounded by warriors phantoms-- and it won't be comprehensive, what with everyone from Powerline to Malkin to Tom Maguire firing at will.

Anyway that intro above is probably longer than what I expect most of my entries will be; so without further ado, yesterday at Tech Central Station Melana Zyer Vickers said unkind things about The Rise of a Market Mentality Means Many Go Hungy in Niger by Craig Timberg. Timberg's lede, stuck as they often are four grafs from the top of the story:

It [starvation] is the result not only of food shortages but a host of other problems, including vendor profiteering, a government policy shift toward a free market, and a decline in the traditional culture of generosity that once helped communities in Niger survive cyclical periods of scarcity.

In a country adopting free market policies, the suffering caused by a poor harvest has been dramatically compounded by a surge in food prices and, many people here suspect, profiteering by a burgeoning community of traders, who in recent years have been freed from government price controls and other mechanisms that once balanced market forces....

Vickers:

"A government policy shift toward a free market"; profiteering by traders "freed from government price controls and other mechanisms that once balanced market forces"; and the rise of "sharper, more selfish attitudes as Niger… reaches for a more materialistic, Westernized future," are to blame for the hunger crisis, according to the news article.

If those assertions are so, what's to be made of the following facts?

- 40-50% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa goes hungry every year, according to the United Nations. Most of that population lives under command-controlled economic conditions.

- No democratic-capitalist state has ever experienced a famine.

-The biggest non-African famines of the 20th century (China with 25-40 million deaths, Soviet Ukraine with 7-10 million deaths) as well as the most notable non-African famine of recent years (North Korea with 2-3 million deaths) were all the result of food requisitioning and economic control by communist governments.

- As South Asia and East Asia have, over the last 30 years, shifted away from command-controlled economies toward market economies, they've seen a reduction of their undernourished population from 43% to 13%.

In Niger specifically, the controls of a command economy are still very visible....