...The answer is not foreign aid, which is corrupting and often worse than useless. In many cases, it further impoverished an already-poor country. Enriched urban elites bought luxury goods, while donated food and socialist controls drove down the local price of food, ruining the farmers on whom these subsistence economies had depended.

We now know that the secret to curing hunger and poverty is capitalism and free trade. We have seen that demonstrated irrefutably in East Asia, which has experienced the greatest alleviation of poverty in history. In half a century, places such as Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea have gone from subsistence living to First World status. And now free markets and free trade are lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty in India and China.

And what has been the Democratic reaction to the prospect of fulfilling Humphrey's (and their party's) great dream? Fear and loathing. Democrats today thunder against the scourge of "outsourcing" -- American firms giving (what would otherwise be American) jobs to Indians and Chinese and other menacing foreigners.

The anti-outsourcing vogue is part of a larger assault on free trade, which until recently -- meaning the Clinton administration -- Democrats had supported. Remember Al Gore's televised debate with Ross Perot, in which Gore demolished Perot's anti-free-trade arguments? Which makes the recent Democratic assault on free trade so jarring, never more so than when John Edwards and John Kerry competed with each other before Super Tuesday to see who was against more trade agreements with more Third World countries.

Edwards boasted about his opposition to trade agreements with Caribbean nations, African states and Chile. Who would have thought we'd hear a Democrat attacking his opponent for supporting a measure that would help millions of Africans to emerge from poverty?[...]