Do libertarians really hate environmentalism so much that they’ll soft-pedal Chinese authoritarianism just to stick a thumb in the eye of the Green Menace for the sake of the shiny capitalist utopia? (The idea seems to be that eventually, in the far-flung future, everyone will be rich, so we shouldn’t worry too much about the current victims of “economic progress.”)

I’m not denying the existence of trade-offs between economic development and containing pollution, but Katherine Mangu-Ward appears to be taking the bracing, straight-up “breaking eggs to make an omelet” line here, with a dash of cultural relativism about human rights thrown in just in case you might worry about poisoned villagers and old women thrown into reeducation camps.

(I realize that there are libertarians, like the good folks over at TAotP, who don’t fit this profile, but you can see why people would get the idea that libertarians aren’t interested in limits on government power so much as in being apologists for corporate capitalism–and in this case, the heavily state-managed-and-subsidized Chinese version, no less.)