If You Divide Live 8 by a V2 Rocket, do you get V-8?

I've read a handful of pieces on the sand poundingly stupid Live 8 concert (if I may quote Elvis Costello, "The dancing was desperate; the music was worse").  Jonah Goldberg and Mark Steyn have humorous pieces making fun celebrity stupidity and the wonder of millionaire rock stars whining about selfish rich people.  The proof they aren't selfish is that every 20 years they give a free concert to "raise our consciousness" about poverty.  But I think the wisest piece is by Anne Applebaum, whose history of the Gulag I have promoted here before.  Applebaum give the economic argument against the solipsism of Live 8.  What Africa suffers from is not an unequal distribution of wealth, but an unequal distribution of capitalism. 

But, among those who work seriously on Africa, it has long been clear that what Africans need isn't only cash, which can be stolen or wasted, but the opportunity to trade their way out of poverty, just as Asians did over the past several decades. Yet the current regime of agricultural tariffs, quotas and export subsidies, whether for American cotton or European sugar, so reduces the price of African agricultural products that African farmers cannot compete. Each European cow costs taxpayers $2.20 a day, while half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day. Withdraw the subsidies for the cows, and Africans might even be able to make competitive cheese.

What are the chances of European and American farmers giving up subsidies in the name of helping starving Africans?  Zero.  This, even though, as Applebaum puts it, "the need to open up agriculture to trade is so obvious to development economists that it hardly bears repeating." 

OK, and she does engage in some delicious Snoop Dog bashing:

Getting millions of people across Europe and the United States to support political leaders who will actually take steps to end the massive farm subsidies -- temporarily or even permanently reducing the incomes of European and American farmers -- is really very difficult. Or, anyway, it's a lot harder than getting them to cheer when millionaire rapper Snoop Dogg shouts that "there's a lot of rich people in the world and a lot of them are just selfish!"