Free to Choose in Estonia

Greg Mankiw excerpts John Tierney's column about Estonia, the Baltic Tiger. I wrote a couple of papers in graduate school about the reforms that Estonia undertook and how American businesses can capitalize on those reforms. What I find most interesting is how Laar instituted the flat tax and other Friedman ideas in a formerly Soviet republic.

Earlier today I read this post on Drum's blog.

Nonetheless, we desperately need radically more attention paid to full employment policies; to labor organization in service industries; to the distributional inequities of free trade policies; to national healthcare; and to significantly more progressive taxation.

I read Drum to remember why I am not a Democrat. Everything he is advocating in that sentence is everything that Friedman, Estonia, Ireland and other success stories would strongly stand against. Estonia has a very free market and their distribution inequality is virtually nonexistent in relation to the US. Why is that? Government policies aid in making the poor poorer, not free market economic policies.