Does inequity cause terrorism? I don’t know, but I like the following.

Today's lead New York Times editorial, about Saudi Arabia, says, "The monarchy should crack down on its own corruption and do a better job of distributing the nation's wealth so that economic inequities do not generate new legions of terrorists."

The sentence is a real gem in the sense that it captures the New York Times view of economics and foreign policy all at once. For the Times wealth is something to be "distributed" by a country's government. In fact, there has been no government ever that has equitably distributed wealth, and certainly no monarchy. If you give the government wealth-distributing power, corruption and inefficiency invariably follow. In America, rather than having the government "distribute" wealth, we, for the most part, allow the natural workings of markets to distribute the wealth. The wealth distribution is determined by the free actions of individuals and businesses. Sure, the American government redistributes some of the wealth by taxing and spending. But if someone suggested that Washington needed to "do a better job of distributing the nation's wealth," they'd probably be greeted with a chuckle and the announcement that the Soviet Union tried central planning and state socialism and it didn't work. We don't so much think of wealth here as "the nation's"; we think of it as belonging to individuals. The Times seems to think different rules should apply in Saudi Arabia.

Similarly odd is the claim that "economic inequities" generate terrorists. It's unclear how this happens. If the Times is claiming that aggrieved and jealous poor people become terrorists, then, in fact, that is at odds with recent experience; many of the terrorists involved in the recent suicide attacks on America were not poor. Their masterminds certainly were not poor. Osama Bin Laden is a multi-millionaire, and Saddam Hussein's net worth has been estimated in the billions of dollars. Maybe what the Times is getting at is that the economic inequities drive the rich to terrorism. But there are plenty of rich people who have not resorted to terrorism to ease their boredom. The Times editorial writers, to judge by their writing, are among those most upset about economic inequities. Yet they have not resorted to terrorism. If by economic inequity the Times means a large gap between rich and poor, then America has lots of economic inequity but has spawned few terrorists. Saudi Arabia lacks freedom and lacks equality of opportunity. The distribution and income inequality problems there, such as they are, are merely symptoms of those deeper problems.