THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

In rich countries, there is a Mother Goose story for children about the goose that laid the golden eggs. A child understands that if you cut open the goose that lays golden eggs, you get no more eggs. But in Cuba and Mexico, they tried to achieve prosperity by seizing foreign investments.

So they didn't get many investments for a long time, either from their own people or from the outside, and they got poorer.

A reasonably intelligent child in a developed country could have told you that would happen, but for the leftist "intellectuals" the third world listens to, "The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs" is just too complicated.

So nobody wanted to invest in those countries. Even inside such countries, people didn't want to invest. Instead of American investment in Latin America, those with money in Latin America have historically tended to put their money in the rich countries.

So we have just explained one of many, many, MANY reasons why public policy in the third world makes them poor. It is because it's SILLY.

The Industrial Revolution is now about a quarter of a MILLENNIUM old, and those countries have still not gotten to the level of sophistication offered by Mother Goose.

Leftists would make America poor by killing the geese that lay the golden eggs. George W. Bush would make America poor by flooding it with the kind of people who vote with less sophistication than is routinely expected of a small child.

The third world is poor because its people are not wise citizens and voters. But Bush tells us that, if we import the population of the third world, they will not bring those reasons with them.

Many people on the right imply what Bush says. They want the borders opened up. They can't say that it is the stupidity of the third worlders themselves that makes them poor.

This brings us to one of the most crippling aspects of respectable conservatism: If you are going to have liberals say you are "respectable," you can't talk in plain English. You have to watch what you say, so you can't say too much.

In Michigan, a lady in a restaurant was upset about all the Spanish-speaking customers, and she said - to her companion, "Why can't these spics learn English?" She was reported, arrested, and sentenced to FORTY-FIVE DAYS IN JAIL!

Yes, she was in America. And no, respectable conservatives are not going to make trouble about it.

The most obvious -- though not the only -- reason the third world is poor is because third worlders keep making the same dumbass political mistakes. You should avoid using insulting labels to tell them this. But they have GOT to be told, and there is no way to make it sound nice.

We can import the entire Mexican excess population, and become leftist and poor ourselves. Or we can make it clear that Mexicans have to convince the world that they are not going to be stupid any more, and prosperity will come to them. Those are the only real choices.

But if anyone says out loud that third world people are responsible for third world poverty, respectable conservatives will beg their liberal masters to allow them to lead the lynch mob against him.

So if you value political respectability above speaking plain English, you're going to lose.