July 4, 2008
China for a Day?
Megan McArdle is in Aspen, which is almost, sortof in Colorado. You can call me names if you want but I really hate Aspen. Like Boulder, it has its charms, but it lacks Boulder's tenuous tether to actual reality.
She is there at a seminar listening to Thomas Friedman. And he is exhorting us to lead the way to "abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons" (my experience with electrons to date has been that they are all four of these things without government interference). Friedman catches McArdle's heart by saying that we don't want a green Manhattan project, that we want to use price signals. But it seems to deteriorate pretty quickly from there:
At this point he sort of goes off the deep end and talks about how great it would be if we could be China for a day--have the government get in, totally reorganize the energy market, and then go forward from there. He bases this on a conversation with Jeff Immelt, who thinks the world would be a better place if this happened.Where to start? Very few people think that China is succeeding because of its awesome industrial policy--China is succeeding very much in spite of its industrial policy. Indeed, its industrial policy is threatening to drag down important sectors of the economy, like the banking system, which may well cause the whole thing to implode.
Here, friends and neighbors, I will make my stand as a pragmatic man of the right. We all feel the Hamiltonian urge. Now and then, we all want to force something on the public or electorate that they don't know is good for them.
But it has been a province of the left to consistently exercise this. Republicans have, I'd cite Nixon, Theodore Roosevelt, and Hoover, but none is held in great esteem by the party or limited government philosophers. President Reagan perhaps blurred the lines a bit in the Iran-Contra imbroglio, President George W. Bush pushes Executive power a long way past what Madison envisioned in Federalist 10, and used some strong-arm legislative tactics to get Medicare Part D passed in a GOP Congress. But the smaller-government politicians have been pretty philosophically consistent.
Against these exceptions, I look at FDR (with Hoover's man Rex Tugwell), Wilson, Johnson -- and the campaign rhetoric of Senator Barack Obama. Constitutional restrictions on government power are an impediment to remaking the world in their way. They have to be "China for Day" to get their benighted ideas past a foolish electorate.
I have railed as well against the millenarian überright who look forward to rebuilding their ideal libertarian world out the ashes of a post-implosion society, We don't need to be China for a day and we don't need to have the Obama administration bring the whole thing down. We enjoy a modern, functioning, self-directed government. It has great flaws, but it can be changed with vision and ideas -- without leaving the Constitutional structure. Going outside or beyond that structure is what got us here -- it is not the solution.