Friday, September 21, 2007

Steyn Quote D'Jour

While Belgium has somehow managed to survive 100 government-free days without any outbreaks of cannibalism, or plagues of locusts, Steyn points out an even more extreme case:
And then there’s Somalia, where, as Professor Peter Leeson of George Mason University points out, functioning government collapsed in 1991. And yet in the 16 years since, by almost every measurable indicator, life has improved: extreme poverty down 20%, infant mortality down 24%, access to health facilities up 25%, measles fatalities down 30%, maternal mortality down over 30%. I hate to sound like a fainthearted moderate squish, but even we small-government conservatives don’t usually have anything quite so drastic as the Somali model in mind. Still, strictly on the empirical evidence, the no-government solution is working out a lot better than the previous three decades of Afro-socialism.

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