etimes, especially on the left, the Third World is presented as the innocent victim of a First World trying to use free trade to keep it down. This view was expressed by the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, the bigoted but not unintelligent Mahathir bin Mohamad, thus: Japan was developing at a time when the Western countries did not believe that Eastern countries could actually catch up with the West, so Japan was allowed. And then, of course, later on, when Japan appeared to be doing too well all the time, the yen was revalued upwards in order to make Japan less competitive. You can see that these are deliberate attempts to slow down the growth in Japan... and after that, of course, Southeast Asian countries, even Malaysia, began to develop fast, and there seemed to be a fear that Eastern countries might actually pose a threat to Western domination, and so something had to be done to stop them. (Source: "Malaysian Prime Minister: 'We Had to Decide Things For Ourselves'," Executive Intelligence Review, February 19, 1999.) Mahathir here basically accuses the developed world of seeking to lock in its present industrial advantage, leaving the rest of the world supplying it raw materials and low-value industrial scraps. Third World nations often (understandably) perceive this as a rerun of colonialism. But it is implausible that the First World is doing this. For a start, if it has the control over the world economy Mahathir imagines, then it should have succeeded by now. Yet Third World giants like China and India surge ahead. It is also unlikely that the First World corporations which actually conduct international trade serve the interests of the nations in which they are headquartered, as opposed to their own profits. Economic, political, and technological power are just too widely distributed in the world today for the literal fulfillment of Mahathir's scenario, even if anyone seriously wanted it (which is doubtful). Another villain theory is that big corporations are evil--an accusation heard at both extremes of the political spectrum, though the right tends to use words like "treasonous." But corporations don't behave as they do because they are evil (or disloyal). They behave as they do because the rules they operate under make certain behavior profitable. If free trade is legal, we should not get morally indignant when corporations fire their high-cost American workforces and move production overseas. We should change the rules that encourage this. Competitive pressures force even corporations that would rather not act this way, which certainly exist, to go along. Cynical comments about politicians, which one hears all the time, are an evasion of our own responsibility. In America, we elected them, so what they do ultimately reflects what we want. If we voters are co