Free market

When the free market is powerful enough to get Iraqi women to risk stoning, not to mention STDs, you know it's a powerful force. They're selling the only thing they have of value.

Oh, it's their children's hunger that drives them? Not some entrepreneurial instinct suppressed by Saddam?

Nuts.

The idiotic faith the Bushists had in the "free" market to solve all economic problems in post-invasion Iraq meant that they didn't plan to employ people at even a subsistence level. What else is new? These boneheads don't even understand that markets in the best of circumstances require time, regulation, and safety nets.

This is exactly the kind of freedom that the Bushists would like for us to have in America. Think how much better urban street corners would be if former welfare mothers would just compete with crack-head skanks to deliver better services at lower prices!

'Race to the bottom' takes on a whole 'nother connotation.