I found Ezra Klein’s most recent column in the New York Times interesting reading if only because it illustrated for me once again why I’m not a progressive although I share some of their putative aspirations. What concerns me about Ezra is that I get the impression that for him a larger, more assertive federal government is an end rather than just a means to an end. He opens with a shout-out to European socialism c. 1960 or 1970:
If you had to distill the ambitions of the Democratic Party down to a single word, you might well choose “Denmark.†But “France†would also work. Or “Germany.†Any Western European nation, really, with the social insurance options many of us envy: universal health care and affordable child care, to name but a few. Much of modern American liberalism is designed to close those gaps, to build here what already exists there.
France and Denmark’s systems of social services were created in the post-war period, up to about 1970. Germany’s is much older. I always find it entertaining when people point to a country whose entire population is smaller than than of New York City and, when its system of social services was established was 98% ethnic Danes and at least culturally Lutheran. The question is not whether such a system could work for the Danes in 1970. The question is whether such a system would be established now. Based on the rate at which the Nordic countries are retreating from their welfare states as they become more diverse, the evidence would suggest not.
Leave that aside because it’s not what the column’s actually about. What Ezra wants is national industrial planning. He wants the federal government to set the objectives for the entire economy not only to achieve the sort of expansive system of social services the Europeans adopted a half century or more ago but to head off climate change:
Build Back Better is a grab-bag of longstanding Democratic proposals jammed together into a superbill designed to evade the filibuster. Or maybe I should say: That’s what it was. But Build Back Better is, at this point, a dead letter. Senator Joe Manchin’s opposition forced Democrats back to the drawing board. The silver lining is that they now have the opportunity to design something that does have a good organizing principle.
But that will require resolving two fundamental tensions in how Democrats conceive of not just what the economy needs but what the government can do to help, and how to know when what the government is doing has hurt.
Many Democrats still fear the dreaded specter of “industrial policy†— of government picking winners and losers, and wasting money or reputation on bad bets and patronage. That pushes them to extremely general goals: more workers, or more research, or more broadband.
But that fear is now matched by a horror of where markets are leading us — into climate crisis. Here, the Biden administration gets specific. It names the technologies it wants and the kinds of infrastructure we lack: better batteries and more electric car charging stations and cheaper solar panels and next-generation geothermal and nuclear technologies.
It is possible that, had Ezra studied economics rather than political science or, had he been a better student, he might have encountered some notion of the knowledge problem in planned economies. Such systems obscure the very price signals that enable an economy to function optimally. And, if he hopes that self-interest can be purged from politicians and other notional public servants, he’s instantiating another of my pet peeves—the notion that human nature is infinitely malleable. There are some eternal verities and self-interest is one of them.
In his conclusion he manages to tie his opening to his strategy:
If Democrats want to claim a bigger role for government in shaping our future, they need to be the ones who are most outraged when it is government that is holding us back.
But to do that, they need a vision of America’s future that’s not just lifted from Western Europe’s past.
Do you see why that makes my wonder whether a “bigger role for government” is an end or a means for him?
My own view is that I think that whether the federal government is too big or too small is a distraction from our actual problem. The federal government is doing the wrong things. I don’t want to minimize government or maximize it. I want to right-size it.
