by Richard Fernandez in PJ Media and the Belmont Club blog
David Rothkop argues in Foreign Policy the big sleeper story of 2014 is
that America has succeeded despite the best efforts of its leaders to fail.
After enumerating the world’s catastrophes, he writes: “amid all these stories
of 2014, the one that may be the most important is one that no one would have
expected”.
America is back. Despite Washington.
Despite lousy leadership. Despite the rise of other great powers. Back because
its economy is resilient. Back because the other great powers are each facing
deep challenges at home — from European coherence to corruption and the slowing
growth of job creation in China. Back because America remains a hotbed of innovation.
Back because the fiscal deficit that threatened it has receded along with the
recession that stirred up fears. Back because it proved that even at a low
point in political creativity, the country could flourish — especially in light
of the fact that that low point is likely to end soon. …
But the majority of the credit goes
to the American people, to American businesses, and to America’s hotbeds of
innovation, be they in universities or research laboratories. … Imagine what
they could have done with leaders who were more effective at advancing
America’s international interests … to better harness the energy and guarantee
the future of all U.S. citizens and all those who are here today contributing
to our economy?
In the words of the Business Insider, “Asia Slows, Europe Stinks, America’s Great”. Actually
relatively few of America’s Founding Fathers would have been shocked by this
counter-intuitive result because they understood, perhaps better than we
moderns do, how little politicians have to do with the success of a nation. In
fact many of the Founders believed the secret to good governance lay in keeping
the politicians as divided and as impotent as possible. Checks and Balances
meant things were in balance when it took several hundred people to sign a
check.
According to that point of view
America succeeds not because of the excellence of its Five Year Plan, but
because it doesn’t have one. The idea that “in God we Trust” isn’t as crazy as
it sounds when you realize it has the benefit of being unbiased. At worst God
will be random. When things are random sometimes the wheel of fortune
will come up in your favor. By contrast politicians are systematic screw-ups.
Events managed by imbeciles and power-mad officials will tend towards
imbecility and venality. The Wheel of City Hall will always come up in
City Hall’s favor.
But Rothkop’s cheerful scenario may
prove to be only an Indian Summer. Storm clouds on the horizon suggest that God
may be spinning the wheel again. Growth in the U.S. manufacturing sector slowed
for the second straight month in December, according to AFP. US construction spending unexpectedly falls in November,
reports Reuters.
America may still be clinging to the
mountain while Europe, Asia and the Middle East are sliding into the crevasse,
but there’s a rope around its waist that’s beginning to tighten just now
… Moreover, the American political leadership continues to trust in
European-style enlightenment with the same fervor the Old Continent does. The California DMV is issuing licenses to illegal immigrants even as people
smugglers in the Mediterranean are sending boat after boat, loaded with African
refugees in the general direction of the Europe on autopilot, knowing that the
authorities must take the unfortunates rather than see them crash against the
rocks. Blind chance would never be so consistently foolish.
Politicians believe that the only
reason for their failure is they haven’t tried hard enough. So they’re going to
order another product from the Acme Corporation and try again. 2015 is the year
Obamacare will finally becomes affordable due to the Employer Mandate, an
increase in Individual Mandate Fines and most of all the groundbreaking National Data Warehouse that will store everyone’s electronic health records.
The Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS) is looking for vendors to run its “National Data Warehouse,” a
database for “capturing, aggregating, and analyzing information” related to
beneficiary and customer experiences with Medicare and the federal Obamacare
marketplaces. Although the database primarily consists of quality control
metrics related to individuals’ interactions with customer service, potential
contractors are to “[d]emonstrate … experience with scalability and security in
protecting data and information with customer, person-sensitive information
including Personal Health Information and Personally Identifiable information
(personal health records, etc.).” Vendors are also instructed that one of the
requirements of a possible future contract would be “[e]nsuring that all
products developed and delivered adhere to Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance standards.”
It’s maximum effort across the
board. The Washington Post reports the strategy of restricting US advisers to
noncombat roles in Iraq is working so well they will probably see fighting soon
soon. “U.S. troops have suffered no casualties in the attacks. But the violence
has underlined the risks to American personnel as they fan out across Iraq as
part of the expanding U.S. mission against the Islamic State, even as President
Obama has pledged that U.S. operations ‘will not involve American combat troops
fighting on foreign soil.’”
The Washington Post, has a kind of anti-Rothkop list of the tasks our leaders
will attempt to make the world a better place in the coming year. They promise
to:
- Address Syria’s civil war and Iraq’s spiraling violence;
- Resolve Russia’s economic collapse;
- Restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process;
- Improve the European Union;
- Rebuild post-war Afghanistan;
- Defuse a crisis in Sri Lanka;
- Resolve the crisis in Yemen and Libya;
- Make a nuclear deal with Iran;
- Stop a newly resurgent Ebola in Africa;
- Reduce tensions between China and Japan;
- Fix global inequality;
- Reach out to North Korea to moderate their immoderation;
- Solve the plight of the Rohingya Muslims in Burma who are menaced by Buddhist extremists
One thing you can say for our
leaders is they are persistent.On radio yesterday I heard the voice of French
economist Thomas Piketty being interviewed by a gushing Australian radio
personality who admiringly described how he understood economic development in
ways that Americans never could. Thomas Piketty has been awarded the Legion d’ Honneur largely on the back
of his runaway besteller Capital in the 21st Century.
Thomas Piketty (French: [t?'ma pik?'ti]; born on 7 May 1971) is a French
economist who works on wealth and income inequality. He is professor (directeur
d’études) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and
professor at the Paris School of Economics.
He is the author of the best-selling
book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which emphasizes the themes of
his work on wealth concentrations and distribution over the past 250 years. The
book argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is
persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause
wealth inequality to increase in the future. To address this problem, he
proposes redistribution through a progressive global tax on wealth.
With all these awards he must know
something and as proof, his expert plan to achieve progress calls for more
taxes. Global, progressive taxes. It fits in with all the rest of the
world plans for improvement. The best and the brightest have examined the human
condition and decided what mankind needs is less consumption, more rationing,
tighter regulation and more accommodation with tyrants. And more taxes.
The Great and the Good don’t believe in miracles for the very simple reason that they believe in themselves
instead. Dr. Richard Smith, a prominent British doctor says “cancer is the ‘best death’
– so don’t waste billions trying to cure it”. After all, not even
the National Data Center, Obamacare or Thomas Piketty can cure cancer. So
it must be hopeless.
If admiring American health care
planners are listening closely to Dr. Smith, it is easy to see why they might
nod in approval. Diseases like cancer are the products of randomness. And
randomness is the anti-Five Year Plan. Despite all our efforts at wellness a
study from Johns Hopkins concludes that cancer is mostly caused by “bad luck”.
Lifestyle choices and genetics are
big risk factors for certain cancers, but a new study concludes that the
majority of cancer incidence is due mostly to bad luck when our cells divide.
The study comes from scientists at
the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center who created a statistical model to
measure the proportion of cancer cases that are caused mainly by random DNA
mutations during stem cell division.
By their calculations, two-thirds of
adult cancer incidents can be explained by “bad luck” when stem cells divide.
Curing cancer is beyond the power of
the Great and the Good but not perhaps above the capability of human innovation
over the long term. The reason is that miracles, like cancer, arise
from the unforeseen. The very same randomness and creativity which give rise to
the world’s problems potentially also give rise to some of their solutions.
Innovation by definition is whatever we haven’t thought of yet. It is whatever
we have failed to include in the Five Year Plan.
Freedom implies doing something
really new. That’s always risky business. The better plan is to
repeat all the old things and call them new.
The events of 2015 will be shaped,
as always, by the interaction of planning and luck. It will be determined
by the interplay of the wisdom of crowds and the snares of the great. Our
leaders will want ever-greater control and most of us will have the good sense
to resist. “I aim to misbehave,” may not only be a cool movie line. It
may be our only hope for long term survival. They scheme and we dream.
And so it goes.
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