Andy Stern, Authoritarian

[Geee]

American Thinker:




You have to wonder what kind of cheese the Wall Street Journal used to bait the mousetrap for Andy Stern, former head of the Service Employees International Union and friend of Obama.

We need to abandon our fundamentalist capitalist ways, wrote the learned Andrew on the Journal's op-ed page, and copy the Chinese and their Five Year Plans.

The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model -- so successful in the 20th century -- is being thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century. In an era when countries need to become economic teams, Team USA's results -- a jobless decade, 30 years of flat median wages, a trade deficit, a shrinking middle class and phenomenal gains in wealth but only for the top 1% -- are pathetic.

You mean the free-market fundamentalist model has brought us from $3 per day to $100 per day over the last two centuries? All played out?
Fortunately, the Journal's edit page team were able to restrain their guffaws long enough to slide out an analysis of China's coming "hard landing" a couple of days later.

There is no easy way to avoid the bust that is coming. The silver lining is that China's increasingly state-led growth model will be discredited, and a debate will begin on restarting the reforms that stalled in the mid-2000s. A financial sector that allocates credit based on politics rather than price signals led China into this mess.

This would all be enormous fun if it weren't so serious. The whole idea that politicians (the guys who know how to buy the voters), or professors, or planners, or union leaders, or an educated elite can run the economy ought, to use Andy Stern's handy metaphor, to have been "thrown onto the trash heap of history" decades ago. The science was settled, way back in the 1920s.

Oh, never mind the science. Let's review the history and the cost in tens of millions of human lives.

It should have been pretty obvious after the Bolsheviks abandoned their "war communism" in the early 1920s that a state-dominated economy was a bad idea. But Stalin decided to repeat the experiment with his Five Year Plans that deliberately starved the Ukraine to pay for industrialization. But he did build a lot of tanks in World War II. Pity that the Five Year Plans didn't figure out that those tanks would need radios for communication and trucks for support. The planless U.S. had to provide those.

Then there were the 30 million dead from starvation from Mao's Great Leap Forward in China, and the 50 wasted years of India's Fabian Society-inspired "license Raj."