Impure Thoughts.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia
• Position: How libertarians should approach difficult issues

Waiting for perfectly "clean" opportunities to apply your principles means you could lose them altogether.

Poor Joe Stiglitz. Here he is, an eminent economist, on everyone's short list for a Nobel Prize. He writes a perfectly respectable New Republic cover story about the failings of the International Monetary Fund. He's particularly concerned that IMF policies make poor countries experiencing recessions poorer and more depressed. The article makes a big splash. Yet when all the publicity is over, Stiglitz has become the intellectual poster child for anti-trade, anti-growth fanatics. What happened?

Stiglitz got involved in a dirty issue, one entangled in many agendas, and he didn't separate his goals from those of larger, louder, sexier coalitions. He wanted to criticize the IMF and, for maximum effect, he did so as the IMF and World Bank were holding big meetings in Washington. But at the same time, protesters hit the streets to condemn not just specific practices of international lending organizations but globalization, trade, and economic growth. Coming off the much larger anti-trade protests in Seattle, these activists dominated journalists' imagination and, hence, set the terms of the discussion.

So, for instance, when PBS' Charlie Rose Show discussed the topic, Stiglitz was paired with Juliette Beck, a young antiglobalization activist and the recent subject of a glowing profile in The New Yorker.

When Charlie Rose asked whether she sees any evidence that the World Bank and IMF get the protesters' message, Beck responded, "Quite frankly no. I think that they are still entrenched in their ideology of 'growth is the solution.' Economic growth, frankly, is leading to a decline in almost every ecosystem on Earth. We cannot sustain this level of growth and yet they're promoting more and more economic growth as a solution. We need to rethink the whole economic system that we're living in."

"Rethinking the whole economic system" is a long way from Stiglitz's argu-ment. From Beck's point of view, what Stiglitz dislikes about the IMF would be a wonderful attribute. What's a depression if not the opposite of Earth-destroying "growth"? Further wrecking the economies of Thailand and Indonesia just moves us closer to a "new paradigm" that will save the environment.

Faced with a supposed ally whose explicit agenda is to end economic growth, Stiglitz had a professional, and moral, responsibility to disagree. He needed to explain why trade and growth...