The Village Square

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• 1. Peri Worrell  |  December 23rd, 2009 at 1:10 pm

  Wait a minute! Friedman seems to be saying here that we are going to fail to out-compete China, because China is an autocracy that can force an agenda from the top down, while the US is based on the competition of ideas and so creates “sub-optimal” interventions. He accuses the Rs of “not playing” at all.

  This is an excellent example of the way the media reframes the political debate towards ever-escalating government intervention. The Rs are being obstructionist in part because their constituency does not believe in anthropogenic global warming and/or does not believe that global warming is necessarily all bad. The Rs constituency does not believe that more government intervention in health care is needed, but rather that laws intervening in health care, like Medicare, Medicaid, HIPAA, and the 1973 HMO act, are much of what has created the problem we have now.

  But these ideas either don’t get a hearing in the mainstream media,or they are given a hearing in a context which makes them appear “extremist” and “crazy”. This was as true when the Bush administration was shoving its USA PATRIOT agenda through as it is now that Obama’s administration is uprooting the economy via the twin prongs of health care “reform” and “environmental” laws on climate change.

  Simple laws of supply and demand are powerful and can actually lower health care costs and decrease pollution (when clean air becomes scarce, it becomes valuable, no?). The last 50 years have been a slide into greater and greater government intervention in the marketplace so that we now have virtually no free markets left at all!

• 2. Liz  |  December 28th, 2009 at 6:22 pm

  Sorry Peri, for some reason the moderate feature isn’t notifying me adequately… didn’t mean to not approve. Well Friedman certainly isn’t saying that authoritarian regimes are GOOD but that our governmental process is just broken now. The competition of ideas isn’t happening because one group thinks the other is all wrong and vice versa. My experience with Village Square is that there are a lot of really bad “facts” fed to the feuding sides by people who make money off the feuding. (Cap & Trade is technically a marketplace.)

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