The massive earthquake in Chile has prompted some very worthwhile—and politically incorrect—comparisons with the disaster in Haiti, where a smaller quake produced much larger casualties.
This is politically incorrect because we're supposed to think of poor nations—what we used to call the Third World—as the victims of Western capitalist imperialism and exploitation and not as bearing any responsibility for their own fate. That's especially true when a nation is suffering from a natural disaster like an earthquake, which the Haitians obviously did not bring upon themselves.
But the example of Chile is showing us that it is not nature that causes the biggest nation-wide disasters. The biggest disasters are, to borrow a notorious phrase, man-caused. They are caused by a failure of economics, a failure of government, and at root a failure of ideas. Or to put this point in more positive terms, the ability to survive and recover from earthquakes and other natural adversity is an achievement made possible by choosing the right ideas about government and economics.
A fiction writer could not have chosen a more dramatic example than the earthquake in Chile, which measured 8.8 on the Richter scale—one of the most powerful ever recorded. The Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens puts this number in perspective.
Earthquake magnitudes are measured on a logarithmic scale. The earthquake that hit Northridge [California] in 1994 measured 6.7 on the Richter scale. But its seismic-energy yield was only half that of the 7.0 quake that hit Haiti in January, which was the equivalent of 2,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs exploding all at once. By contrast, Saturday's earthquake in Chile measured 8.8. That's nearly 500 times more powerful than Haiti's, or about one million Hiroshimas.
By the standards of earthquakes, 8.8 is the apocalypse. Except that it wasn't, not for Chile. It looks like fewer than one thousand people died in the Chilean quake—compared to more than 200,000 lives lost in Haiti. The reason for Chile's much higher survival rate is simple: the greater wealth produced by a society that has free markets and the rule of law. Stephens provides some of the history:
In 1973, the year the proto-Chavista [i.e., dictatorial socialist] government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Chile was an economic shambles. Inflation topped out at an annual rate of 1000%, foreign-currency reserves were totally depleted, and per capita GDP was roughly that of Peru and well below Argentina's….
Stephens then describes a 1975 meeting with Milton Friedman that caused Pinochet to follow an economic plan devised by pro-free-market economists from the University of Chicago. The results:
By 1990, the year [Pinochet] ceded power, per capita GDP had risen by 40% (in 2005 dollars) even as Peru and Argentina stagnated. Pinochet's democratic successors—all of them nominally left-of-center—only deepened the liberalization drive. Result: Chileans have become South America's richest people. They have the continent's lowest level of corruption, the lowest infant-mortality rate, and the lowest number of people living below the poverty line.
Chile also has some of the world's strictest building codes. That makes sense for a country that straddles two massive tectonic plates. But having codes is one thing, enforcing them is another. The quality and consistency of enforcement is typically correlated to the wealth of nations. The poorer the country, the likelier people are to scrimp on rebar, or use poor quality concrete, or lie about compliance.
In other words, having building codes is not what's important. What's important is being able to afford to build to high safety standards. And of course a higher level of wealth means that Chile has the infrastructure and financial reserves to provide help for those who are homeless and need aid in the aftermath of the quake.
In short, all of the things that make life in Chile better during the good times make the difference between life and death in an emergency. Thus, even though Chile's quake was 500 times more powerful than Haiti's, it was 200 times less deadly. That is the difference that the right ideas about government can make.
Incidentally, this is also an answer to the radical environmentalists, who tell us that we would be better off living with less wealth. That only works in a mystical James Cameron fantasy where nature is always benevolent. But on the planet we actually live on, the earth has its own business to do on a scale so big that humans are irrelevant. The shifting of whole continents produces volcanoes and earthquakes, vast global air circulation patterns throw up tornados and hurricanes, nature sends snowstorms and heat waves, hailstorms and drought. And if we're in the way, that's just too bad for us.
Each of these individual disasters is rare, but over the long term they are inevitable, and the only protection against them is wealth. Chile's rebuilding, for example, is estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars. But Chile has tens of billions of dollars—it's GDP in 2008 was $169 billion—and it has access to even more money than its own resources can provide, because foreigners know that it is safe to invest there.
The only route to this level of wealth is economic freedom. That has been demonstrated, not only in Chile, but across the globe. Wealth and freedom will not save everyone. It couldn't protect the Chilean coastal towns that were wiped out by a 30-foot tsunami that accounted for the largest share of Chile's casualties. But Chile's wealth made the difference between a local catastrophe in a cluster of fishing villages, and a crushing national catastrophe.
Not so in Haiti. There, everything that made life miserable in normal times—the chaotic government and near total absence of property rights, with the resulting poverty, stagnation, and corruption—made life impossible when disaster struck.
But no earthquake is necessary for a national disaster, and that's what the current crisis in Greece proves. This is a country that has had its share of earthquakes over the centuries, but it is now demonstrating that bad government can produce a disaster on its own power.
The Greek crisis is a microcosm of everything that is wrong with the European welfare state. Huge taxes and intrusive regulations discourage production and wealth-creation—but those taxes still aren't enough to pay for a system of government handouts, which can't be reduced because of political pressure from labor unions and leftist protest groups. So the welfare state is supported by massive debt that the country can no longer afford. Now Greece is on brink of default and asking for a bailout from Germany—even as its irresponsible politicians, showing no capacity for reflecting on their own misdeeds, denounce Germans as Nazis.
Greece is a nation in crisis for no other reason than its own choices. And the most frightening thing about it is that our own political leaders—president Obama and the Democrats who control Congress—are busy making exactly the same kind of choices.
What we need to realize is that the world's biggest disasters aren't caused by nature. They are caused by man. They are caused by human choices and by one choice in particular: the choice to evade the truth. The truth is that we know how to achieve prosperity and thereby improve and preserve human life. The historical record on this is irrefutable: we need free markets, free trade, property rights, the rule of law, and limited government—in a word, capitalism. But the world refuses to accept this knowledge because it clashes with their preconceived notions about the supposed evils of "materialism" or "unbridled greed"—catchphrases used to portray the production of wealth by ambitious entrepreneurs as harmful, rather than as the source of human well-being. So they invent nonexistent disasters like "global warming," in order to prevent us from seeing the enormous benefits of capitalism. By so doing, they threaten to leave us at the mercy of genuine natural upheavals.
In this day and age, the real disaster that threatens human life is intellectual—an unwillingness to see and learn from the lessons of history. And that is the cause that turns natural adversity into catastrophe.
Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist (TIA) and contributor to The Freedom Fighter's Journal
This is politically incorrect because we're supposed to think of poor nations—what we used to call the Third World—as the victims of Western capitalist imperialism and exploitation and not as bearing any responsibility for their own fate. That's especially true when a nation is suffering from a natural disaster like an earthquake, which the Haitians obviously did not bring upon themselves.
But the example of Chile is showing us that it is not nature that causes the biggest nation-wide disasters. The biggest disasters are, to borrow a notorious phrase, man-caused. They are caused by a failure of economics, a failure of government, and at root a failure of ideas. Or to put this point in more positive terms, the ability to survive and recover from earthquakes and other natural adversity is an achievement made possible by choosing the right ideas about government and economics.
A fiction writer could not have chosen a more dramatic example than the earthquake in Chile, which measured 8.8 on the Richter scale—one of the most powerful ever recorded. The Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens puts this number in perspective.
Earthquake magnitudes are measured on a logarithmic scale. The earthquake that hit Northridge [California] in 1994 measured 6.7 on the Richter scale. But its seismic-energy yield was only half that of the 7.0 quake that hit Haiti in January, which was the equivalent of 2,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs exploding all at once. By contrast, Saturday's earthquake in Chile measured 8.8. That's nearly 500 times more powerful than Haiti's, or about one million Hiroshimas.
By the standards of earthquakes, 8.8 is the apocalypse. Except that it wasn't, not for Chile. It looks like fewer than one thousand people died in the Chilean quake—compared to more than 200,000 lives lost in Haiti. The reason for Chile's much higher survival rate is simple: the greater wealth produced by a society that has free markets and the rule of law. Stephens provides some of the history:
In 1973, the year the proto-Chavista [i.e., dictatorial socialist] government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Chile was an economic shambles. Inflation topped out at an annual rate of 1000%, foreign-currency reserves were totally depleted, and per capita GDP was roughly that of Peru and well below Argentina's….
Stephens then describes a 1975 meeting with Milton Friedman that caused Pinochet to follow an economic plan devised by pro-free-market economists from the University of Chicago. The results:
By 1990, the year [Pinochet] ceded power, per capita GDP had risen by 40% (in 2005 dollars) even as Peru and Argentina stagnated. Pinochet's democratic successors—all of them nominally left-of-center—only deepened the liberalization drive. Result: Chileans have become South America's richest people. They have the continent's lowest level of corruption, the lowest infant-mortality rate, and the lowest number of people living below the poverty line.
Chile also has some of the world's strictest building codes. That makes sense for a country that straddles two massive tectonic plates. But having codes is one thing, enforcing them is another. The quality and consistency of enforcement is typically correlated to the wealth of nations. The poorer the country, the likelier people are to scrimp on rebar, or use poor quality concrete, or lie about compliance.
In other words, having building codes is not what's important. What's important is being able to afford to build to high safety standards. And of course a higher level of wealth means that Chile has the infrastructure and financial reserves to provide help for those who are homeless and need aid in the aftermath of the quake.
In short, all of the things that make life in Chile better during the good times make the difference between life and death in an emergency. Thus, even though Chile's quake was 500 times more powerful than Haiti's, it was 200 times less deadly. That is the difference that the right ideas about government can make.
Incidentally, this is also an answer to the radical environmentalists, who tell us that we would be better off living with less wealth. That only works in a mystical James Cameron fantasy where nature is always benevolent. But on the planet we actually live on, the earth has its own business to do on a scale so big that humans are irrelevant. The shifting of whole continents produces volcanoes and earthquakes, vast global air circulation patterns throw up tornados and hurricanes, nature sends snowstorms and heat waves, hailstorms and drought. And if we're in the way, that's just too bad for us.
Each of these individual disasters is rare, but over the long term they are inevitable, and the only protection against them is wealth. Chile's rebuilding, for example, is estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars. But Chile has tens of billions of dollars—it's GDP in 2008 was $169 billion—and it has access to even more money than its own resources can provide, because foreigners know that it is safe to invest there.
The only route to this level of wealth is economic freedom. That has been demonstrated, not only in Chile, but across the globe. Wealth and freedom will not save everyone. It couldn't protect the Chilean coastal towns that were wiped out by a 30-foot tsunami that accounted for the largest share of Chile's casualties. But Chile's wealth made the difference between a local catastrophe in a cluster of fishing villages, and a crushing national catastrophe.
Not so in Haiti. There, everything that made life miserable in normal times—the chaotic government and near total absence of property rights, with the resulting poverty, stagnation, and corruption—made life impossible when disaster struck.
But no earthquake is necessary for a national disaster, and that's what the current crisis in Greece proves. This is a country that has had its share of earthquakes over the centuries, but it is now demonstrating that bad government can produce a disaster on its own power.
The Greek crisis is a microcosm of everything that is wrong with the European welfare state. Huge taxes and intrusive regulations discourage production and wealth-creation—but those taxes still aren't enough to pay for a system of government handouts, which can't be reduced because of political pressure from labor unions and leftist protest groups. So the welfare state is supported by massive debt that the country can no longer afford. Now Greece is on brink of default and asking for a bailout from Germany—even as its irresponsible politicians, showing no capacity for reflecting on their own misdeeds, denounce Germans as Nazis.
Greece is a nation in crisis for no other reason than its own choices. And the most frightening thing about it is that our own political leaders—president Obama and the Democrats who control Congress—are busy making exactly the same kind of choices.
What we need to realize is that the world's biggest disasters aren't caused by nature. They are caused by man. They are caused by human choices and by one choice in particular: the choice to evade the truth. The truth is that we know how to achieve prosperity and thereby improve and preserve human life. The historical record on this is irrefutable: we need free markets, free trade, property rights, the rule of law, and limited government—in a word, capitalism. But the world refuses to accept this knowledge because it clashes with their preconceived notions about the supposed evils of "materialism" or "unbridled greed"—catchphrases used to portray the production of wealth by ambitious entrepreneurs as harmful, rather than as the source of human well-being. So they invent nonexistent disasters like "global warming," in order to prevent us from seeing the enormous benefits of capitalism. By so doing, they threaten to leave us at the mercy of genuine natural upheavals.
In this day and age, the real disaster that threatens human life is intellectual—an unwillingness to see and learn from the lessons of history. And that is the cause that turns natural adversity into catastrophe.
Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist (TIA) and contributor to The Freedom Fighter's Journal
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