by Jessica Kuzmier

Created on: December 17, 2008

The free market has been lauded as a hallmark of a democratic and free society. G-8 countries convene every year, discovering ways to spread the good news of this economic gospel. Domestically, the free market promises that the good life could be held by all if one would just work hard enough at his dream. Yet not all seems to be rosy with this dream. On an international and domestic level, the free market has not given the liberation it has promised. In some ways, it has only cemented the inequality already there.

In "Globalizing Hate", (Amy Chua, Amnesty Now, Summer 2003), the author argues that a rampant global free market does little to ensure equality for all the world's people. Instead, an ethnic majority that has been suppressed already, perhaps through slavery or colonialism, becomes further exploited by a richer minority. This richer minority may wield power due to old colonial ties, such as Britain in Iraq, or simply due to the entrepreneurship of a wealthy few, such as Chinese emigrants in Southeast Asia. Many times, this leads to violence on the part of the oppressed majority.

In her article, Chua cites an example with personal overtones. Chua's aunt, Leona, was an ethnic Chinese entrepreneur living in the Philippines when she was murdered by her own Filipino driver, with the complicity of her two maids. The Filipino police never apprehended her killer. Chua's aunt owned a plastic conglomerate in the Philippines, but her servants slept on mats on a dirt floor. Leona justified this treatment by claiming that if they didn't like it, they could go work somewhere else, an argument commonly used in the United States when workers complain about job conditions. But like the American working poor, finding another job with better conditions was difficult for the Filipinos. Ethnic Chinese controlled sixty percent of the Filipino economy, and much of the remaining forty percent was dominated by Spanish mestizos; many of the conditions that Leona's driver found in her service would be found in the service of these other foreign investors.

This same economic story could be told in Indonesia, where the Chinese only account for three percent of the population yet control seventy percent of the economy. Liberation of Indonesia in 1998, which the US hailed as a grand celebration for democracy and free markets, only served to spark the violence in Indonesia that still continues until this day. One way to explain this phenomena is that since the Indonesian natives

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