In residence this year, I had the pleasure of living with a bunch of
hairy-legged, guitar-playing arts students. You know, the type who
criticize you for buying toothpaste that was made by a company that is owned
by another company that has a subsidiary who hired some guy who worked for a
company that hired child laborers in Tajikistan. They meant well, but often
they would make arguments that were fundamentally flawed in the name of the
Big Battle Against Evil Capitalists. They of course all went to Quebec City
for Tear-Gas-Fest 2000, but didn't really understand anything about free
trade, and its net benefits if correctly applied. As one put it, "For me,
it's not about the FTAA, it's about destroying capitalism."
Where exactly do the neo-hippies come from? Mostly, from what I can tell,
from fairly well-to-do families who are able to send them to Canada's
4th-best university because of the money brought to them by the capitalism
that claim to be at war against. In fact, a large portion of them are
Americans. If you ever point out that Canada has the world's No. 1 standard
of living, and that it isn't because of Castro, they'll just mumble
something about you being an ignorant bourgeois and go off to practice
throwing rocks at police officers. All of a sudden, seeing as they're in
first-year university, this makes them experts on everything, and gives them
a mission to save the world from people who shave.
The most irritating thing about these people (aside from the smell) is that
most of their arguments go against the principles that they claim to
support. None of them get how tradable emissions permits actually let you
reduce pollution more, or how free trade (and yes, the evil multi-nationals)
helps developing countries develop, or how 20 000 hippies don't represent
800 million North-and-South-Americans. Basically, they've learned enough to
use big words, but not enough to see what's behind them. The worst kind of
ignorant people are ones who don't realize how much they don't know. So
anyhow, to solve this infestation of neo-hippies, I propose that we export
them all to Cuba, and have a big party at which we wear top hats and light
cigars with 20$ bills. Viva la revolución!
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