Brink Lindsey takes on Paul Krugman and “nostalgianomics.” With delightful results:
The increasing focus on individual fulfillment means, inevitably, less deference to tradition and organizations. “A major component of the Postmodern shift,” Inglehart argues, “is a shift away from both religious and bureaucratic authority, bringing declining emphasis on all kinds of authority. For deference to authority has high costs: the individual’s personal goals must be subordinated to those of a broader entity.”
Paul Krugman may long for the return of selfdenying corporate workers who declined to seek better opportunities out of organizational loyalty, and thus kept wages artificially suppressed, but these are creatures of a bygone ethos—an ethos that also included uncritical acceptance of racist and sexist traditions and often brutish intolerance of deviations from mainstream lifestyles and sensibilities.
The rise in income inequality does raise issues of legitimate public concern. And reasonable people disagree hotly about what ought to be done to ensure that our prosperity is widely shared. But the caricature of postwar history put forward by Krugman and other purveyors of nostalgianomics won’t lead us anywhere. Reactionary fantasies never do.
Via Ed at Hot Air, who remarks:
Obama and his allies have a sepia-tinged nostalgic ideal of the auto industry, back when Americans didn’t face competition and the unions could call the shots. Now, the US has global competition, and the problem with the American auto industry is huge overhead, caused at least in equal parts by bad management and union decisions. Obama’s takeover of GM essentially puts all the wrong people in charge (including himself, a position from which he demurs — for the moment) on a path to a 1940s economic model that has long since passed. The end result: a GM that looks pretty but is essentially immobile, thanks to a government-union cabal that will make the company into a museum piece sooner rather than later.
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