Rodney Balko at Techcentralstation

We should strive to saddle women who scavenge city dumps in Cambodia and fistulas sufferers abandoned for coyotes in Niger with the tyranny of mustard, the frustration of rush hour gridlock, and the aggravation of spam email. We ought to work to make Bangladeshi parents agonize over putting their hyperactive sons on Ritalin. We ought to see how many Malaysians we can get addicted to Paxil, and Papua New Guinean housewives to Valium.

When the critics of capitalism are reduced to mining the suburbs for languor and tedium, when consumers in market economies gripe not about scarcity or pollution, but about too many ketchups and self-check grocery aisles, perhaps it’s safe to say that free-marketeers may finally have the central planners on the ropes.

Let’s see how long we can keep them there, and how many of the world’s poor we can infect with the afflictions of prosperity while we’re at it.

Yeah, what he said.