The economic reality behind earthshaking tragedies

By now, I'm sure all of you have heard about the devastating earthquake in Southeast Asia. In a typically thoughtful post, Laer, at Cheat-Seeking Missiles, points out the inevitably of these tragedies given the Left's antipathy to a global market economy:

Politics has consequences, sometimes life and death consequences. Hard environmentalists and anti-globalists want people in poor countries to stay poor, just like they want people in rich countries to become poorer. But they hatch these schemes in their well-engineered, reinforced, heated and cooled homes.

You'll want to read the whole thing. UPDATE: Anne, at PalmTree Pundit was struck by the same post, and took it a step further to point out the adulation the Left lavishes on the image of Third World poverty, investing it in a golden glow that has nothing to do with the squalor, disease and death that haunt the people who actually have to live in the Third World.