he latest protest-riddled meeting of the world's industrialized powers is over, but not before inspiring more unease about the whole idea of these high-level schmoozefests. A single demonstrator in Genoa, Italy, was killed — in the act of hurling a fire extinguisher at a police van — and many influential people suddenly began to fret very loudly in public.

Any death is sad, but it is important not to let this one obscure what these protests signify. I do not mean anarchy, although they may seem to imply that. Nor do they mean the beginning of the end of growing world trade and spreading international development. Hardly.

No, the protests are mainly advertisements for the strength of the capitalist democracies that provoke them. These ardent young people, who plan their trips to these conferences on the Internet, carry cell phones and arrive by jet, often without having to stop at customs because of relaxed rules in the new Europe. They are symbols for the wonders of the very system they're so worked up about.

The Group of 8 nations are so successful, in fact, that they can spare their young citizens the travails of pointless war, periodic famines or subsistence farming. Instead, capitalism offers them the balm of extended studies lasting well into adulthood, punctuated only by public tantrums over the failure of their imagined utopia to materialize. It's a system so adept at producing freedom, leisure and long life that it gives us ample opportunity to indulge the harmless luxury of "a nihilist avant- garde," as John Updike's fictional novelist Henry Bech called it in noting its absence from what was then Communist Czechoslovakia.

Of course, this luxury is only harmless while the grown-ups act grown up. These protesters, however, have no coherent idea what they're after. In general, there is talk of a better shake for the world's poor, yet the demonstrators appear to be against the only thing giving the world's poorest nations any hope at all: continued global economic growth, led by import-happy Americans whose purchases help put food on the table from Bolivia to Bangladesh.

That is why, young and handsome and idealistic as these protesters so often are, it is important to crush them — figuratively, of course — if they won't go home and find other means of exorcising their great guilt at their own good fortune. You may not like the collection of aging white men who, thanks in part to the power of corporations, lead the world's richest nations. But for all their flaws, the economic vision they represent is infinitely more plausible and more humane than the one their critics appear unable even to articulate.

And while these demonstrators mainly demonstrate how wildly successful capitalism has been in the various G-8 countries, their ideas are a threat to the very people they seem bent on helping. The worry is that a few of the G-8 leaders, experienced at caving in to protesting train workers and the like, will lose a little of their fervor not only for international conferences, but also for internationalism generally.

Soon after the Genoa meetings ended last month, for instance, President Jacques Chirac of France said it was time to give serious thought to what was prompting so many people to turn up in the streets. "There is an anxiety, a concern there," Mr. Chirac said. "We cannot pretend that it doesn't exist."

Le Monde went further. "Public opinion will no longer support these reunions, the violence they trigger and the decisions they produce," it wrote. "It is time to review the formula."

But how can it be bad that some of the world's leaders meet? And what about the hundreds of millions of people around the world who benefit from the decisions that come from these sessions? For the world's downtrodden, the rise of global trade and investment is the best hope not just for a better life but also for greater human rights, political power and a more peaceful world. The other things that have been tried so far, like collectivized agriculture and huge foreign loans, are part of a litany of failures with side effects too vast to enumerate here.

All we need now are Western leaders with the guts to act on what they already know. 

Daniel Akst's column tilts at conventional business wisdom and appears the first Sunday of each month. E-mail culmoney@nytimes.com