Nothing sums up the utter cluelessness of the left more than this quote, from the letter in the New York Times that you discussed ("The Left Disciplines Krugman" 12/5/2003):
"...global consumption is unsustainable, especially as the population increases..."
Poverty is defined by poor people's inability to consume and/or the lack of consumables in their environs. To eliminate poverty we need to make poor people into better producers -- and therefore earners -- and into better consumers. In other words: we need to make them better consumers; therefore we need more global consumption, not less if we really want to end poverty and poor lifestyles.

The chief engine of the increase of global abundance is USA consumption. If Americans consumed less, the world would go into recession - only creating more poverty. Leftists who are really concerned about global poverty should ask Americans to consume more. And they should demand that Japan and China and the EU buy as freely from the world as they sell to the USA.

Protectionism only creates more poverty. Trade always helps more people than it hurts since all products and services are used and consumed by more people than provide them or make them. Protect any service or product can only help a few - while hurting the many; for example tariffs on foreign textiles might save a million textile jobs, but only by asking 300 million people to pay more than they might otherwise pay. And at the same time not imporiving the lives of the foreign workers for whom a relatively lower textile income represents a huge increase in their ability to consume.

As for the fear that the leftists have that we consume too much relative to a limited supply of raw materials, the fact is that virtually all raw materials are in greater supply and are relatively lower priced now than in the 1970's -- when it seems the leftists became frozen in time as "anti-Vietnam War ecologists." Oil reserves are more plentiful, and gas is cheaper now than in 1970. In fact, the history of free markets proves that industry does not exhaust the supply of one raw material after another, but instead discovers value in previously non-valuable raw materials -- as when silicon became valuable for computer chips. Or when kerosene supplanted whale oil. Or now as when nanotechnology may make carbon very valuable.

Daniel Aronstein