After you returned from a recent trip to Nicaragua, you told me it's becoming more difficult to tell the difference between economists and Nazi doctors. What did you mean by that?

There's a report from UNESCO (which I didn't see reported in the US media) that estimated the human cost of the "reforms" that aim to return Eastern Europe to its Third World status.

UNESCO estimates that about a half a million deaths a year in Russia since 1989 are the direct result of the reforms, caused by the collapse of health services, the increase in disease, the increase in malnutrition and so on. Killing half a million people a year -- that's a fairly substantial achievement for reformers.

The figures are similar, but not quite as bad, in the rest of Eastern Europe. In the Third World, the numbers are fantastic. For example, another UNESCO report estimated that about half a million children in Africa die every year simply from debt service. Not from the whole array of reforms -- just from interest on their countries' debts.

It's estimated that about eleven million children die every year from easily curable diseases, most of which could be overcome by treatments that cost a couple of cents. But the economists tell us that to do this would be interference with the market system.

There's nothing new about this. It's very reminiscent of the British economists who, during the Irish potato famine in the mid-nineteenth century, dictated that Ireland must export food to Britain -- which it did right through the famine -- and that it shouldn't be given food aid because that would violate the sacred principles of political economy. These policies always happen to have the curious property of benefiting the wealthy and harming the poor.