October 28, 2002

silhouette3.JPG From the desk of Jane Galt:

Busy, busy right now. .

Busy, busy right now. . . little time to post. Hope I can tide you over with this fascinating email from one of my readers:

Jane,

A very brief note on a phenomenon that struck me last night as I watched German TV. Sabine Christiansen is a well-regarded talk-show moderator, who hosts a number of guests on her show every other Sunday evening. (Unlike most of her American counterparts, she seems content to set the stage with a few comments at the outset and minimal interference during the discussion. Her guests are generally 'doers' rather than talking head, and each show seats 5-6 people of various stripes in an attempt at a roundtable discussion of events of the day - to the extent that guests refrain from spouting set-piece sound bytes.)

Anyway, last night the theme was the German economy, or more specifically reforming the German economy. Remarkably (or at least I remarked to my girlfriend), not a single guest was from the private sector ! I may be overstating, but if there's a clearer indictment of what's wrong with the German concept of the economy, I don't know what it could be. This panel encapsulates perfectly the German idea that government (either liberal or conservative, but still government), unions and academia are the forces to
decide how to organize the economy. Small wonder that Germany's now being referred to as the 'sick man of Europe'.

Don't know that many of your readers would be interested in this tidbit (since Germany is already so far on the outs that it would take major rehabilition to get back to 'misguided'), but the show certainly demonstrated the gulf between accepted economic theorizing in the US (even among liberals) and in Germany (even among conservatives).

Cheers,
Bob

PS - There was so much statism in play, that I couldn't bear to watch any longer and switched to a in-depth piece on the Moscow horror.


It's interesting, when you hang out with Europeans, to find how different our conception of liberal/conservative is. Even liberal Europeans are in many ways more socially conservative than conservative Americans; they're willing to tolerate a degree of enforced conformity that is quite amazing to an American. Though they may argue about what the One Right Way to do things is, they have little problem with the state, not to mention the neighbors, deciding there is a One Right Way and setting policy around that ideal.

Which I suppose just feeds into the prevalance of the idea, even among conservatives, that there is also a One Right Way for the economy, and that the state should be the driver behind that as well.

Many of my European friends tell me that to them, the political spectrum in America seems bizarrely cortated -- they have parties much farther to the left, and even some much farther to the right (socially), than ours. But on the other hand, the substantive disagreement between their parties is not between more or less state intervention; it is over how, not whether, the state should run people's lives.

Posted by Jane Galt at October 28, 2002 6:55 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links