On his Web page, he wrote, "Will we ever get to the point that we realize we will be more secure when the rest of the world isn’t living in poverty so we [Americans] can have nice running shoes?"

The implication of that hideous statement is that Americans have "nice running shoes" because "the rest of the world" is "living in poverty."

That's a typically Marxian presumption -- that there’s an eternally fixed pool of wealth and that someone getting richer, in this case America, necessarily makes others poorer.

Never mind that, in the attempt to get rich themselves, innovators like Thomas Edison help to enrich us all by creating and marketing labor-saving devices, such as the light bulb, that heighten the average standard of living.

Moore absurdly argues that businesses somehow flourished because the U.S. government bombed Arab civilians, even before our current war. But only defense contractors “score” when higher taxes are extorted from all other companies to pay for their weaponry.

Leftists usually claim that Third-World poverty is caused by multinational corporations "stealing natural resources" (even though that’s the fault of Third World governments for failing to fully recognize and secure indigenous people’s private property) and by "exploiting" workers with low pay (even though, if these companies didn’t employ these workers, they'd be making zero cents).

In reality, the Third-World countries are poor because their governments are socialist or fascist, which means that they severely limit economic freedom. Afghanistan under the Taliban's rule is a striking example.

Notice how mass-marketing of electronic products was illegal there. That certainly reflected the government's infringing upon the rights of its citizens to hold harmless private property.

But following the logic of Moore’s "progressive" cohorts, far more moderate people assume that (1) terrorism is caused by poverty, and (2) poverty is caused by free markets. Therefore, they say, America should donate even more tax dollars in foreign aid to the Third World.

In the past, however, foreign aid has been consistently disastrous. When America dumped "free" food on India during the New Deal, that severely depressed the price of agricultural goods to the extent that Indian farmers couldn't profit. That hampered India's economic self-sufficience.

Noting foreign aid’s failure to effectively enrich nations, leftists charge that charitable organizations like the IMF/World Bank cause misery, not because they’re socialistically stealing from the rich nations (through taxes) to “help” the poor countries, but because “greedy capitalists” run them.

But the truly capitalist prescription for international poverty would be to convince the Third World governments to free up their economies and privatize industrial development, as well as allow all citizens -- not just wealthy foreign corporate executives -- the opportunity to open up indigenous businesses without crushing them under an avalanche of regulatory hassles.

It would also mean legally recognizing private property rights through which peasants could protect their homes from “spillover” effects induced by multinational corporate activities like strip-mining.

And greater free trade would expand international markets for entrepreneurs in poor nations. Yet that’s precisely what leftists like Moore, Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky fight against.

Furthermore, as the Ayn Rand Institute’s Alex Epstein observes, the whole attempt to link poverty to terrorism is dubious.

"The terrorists of Sept. 11th did not attack America in order to make Afghanistan richer," he notes. "To the contrary, their stated goal was to repel any penetration of the prosperous culture of the industrialized 'infidels' into their world. The wealthy Osama bin Laden was not using his millions to build electric power plants or irrigation canals. If he and his terrorist minions wanted prosperity, they would seek to emulate the U.S. -- not to destroy it.

"More fundamentally, poverty as such cannot determine anyone's code of morality. It is the ideas that individuals choose to adopt which make them pursue certain goals and values."

Precisely -- ideas. One of the terrorists’ delusions is the Michael Moore-ish idea that wealth -- which America earned rather than stole -- is definitive proof of our decadence.

People don’t become terrorists simply because other people are rich and they are not. But they do become terrorists when they believe the very fallacy that leftists like Moore have been teaching for years -- that it’s somehow valid to resent others for their prosperity as such.

Leftists have it backward. America shouldn’t be ashamed of its capitalism, but proud of it.

Stuart K. Hayashi is the president of the Reason Club of Honolulu and an undergraduate in Entrepreneurial Studies at Hawaii Pacific University, though his opinions do not necessarily reflect that of either institution. He can be reached at radical_individualist@hotmail.com

Guest Commentary...