Countries previously starving have grown rich in a generation through free market capitalism.
We have more free trade than ever. There's more private property. Profit and loss rules and consumers are king. Politicians and bureaucrats are increasingly marginalised. They don't have the power and control they once had.
They don't like it but that doesn't make the free market dead. It's alive and well and feeding the world.
It's a line that may go down a treat with Green Party faithful but it shows they have another leader too shallow and too lazy to think and debate.
That's the last thing the Greens need.
To be fair, there were early inklings of trouble between us.
For a start, it proved a one-way thing: he ran a mile when I endorsed him.
Then I learned he doesn't have a driver's licence. Being driven around by others doesn't reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Imagine the conversation.
"I don't drive. I'm saving the planet. But could you pick me up around eight?"
His rival for leadership, Kevin Hague, in a non-Green outburst, attacked Shaw as too metrosexual.
Only in the Greens could a homosexual attack a rival as metrosexual. I had to look it up the meaning of the word.
Hague's outburst confirms that the Greens with their choice of leader don't quite live on the planet they desperately believe needs them.
They live far away from the productive world sipping their lattes up the Aro Valley following the latest green fad on their smartphones.
"Oh, no fossil fuels. They're stinky. They're cooking the planet. I don't even drive."
Their entire lifestyle is driven off fossil fuels. They fly in jets, hook up to the internet and wear the latest clothes.
They live on the backs of farmers, miners, loggers and fishermen. They don't reject their taxpayer dollars as coming from dirty fuels.
And now my former pin-up boy wants to run the country on a learner plate.
Debate on this article is now closed.
