2016 March 29^th

This morning we are greeted by a gloomy forecast from George Will. Mr. Will, as most of you know, is the very intellectually gifted conservative commentator. His column today is titled, “Why the future will disappoint us.” Whoa! That’s not very encouraging.

Mr. Will’s column points out the enormous and very effective civilizing influences of industry—and medicine—over the hundred years from 1870 to 1970. He points out that in 1870 “Urban horses produced mountains and rivers of waste.” Home lighting, then, came from candles and whale oil; thousands died of yellow fever; the typical North Carolina housewife carried water into her home eight to ten times daily; there were eight thousand registered automobiles in 1900 but 26.8 million in 1930. For all of this, and for what follows, Will touts Robert Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” in which Professor Gordon, a Northwestern University academic economist, makes the case that the unprecedented growth of the last century and a half cannot continue at the same pace.  He’s right.

Then Will gets to what he sees as a large part of the problem: “…there are many reasons to believe that the rapid expansion of regulatory, redistributive government, which can be reformed, has contributed to--it certainly has coincided with—the onset of economic anemia.” Here Will lapses into nonsense. Government regulations are the evil genie that is destroying this wonderful picture? Where have we heard this before?

Let’s do away with regulations: no more sanitary inspections of restaurants; why worry about dishwashers that can’t get water over lukewarm…and what’s the problem with having an attorney who never passed the bar exam, or the electrician who can’t find the ground wire. Does your pharmacist confuse gabapentin with pregabelin? They do sound alike don’t they? So they probably work the same way. Never mind. … The absurdity of blaming regulatory requirements is obvious.

Most of the splendid advances Will talks about involved the private economy. He neglects to mention the enormous support for our well-being provided by government programs. (I’m sure that was just an oversight.) Consider the government construction of the interstate highway system; that happened in the 1950s and he makes no mention of it. Consider the construction of the various power dams in the west during the depression. These provided electricity and the necessary water for the development of California truck farming; no mention of that either. If you were a businessman or a small farmer in 1930 and you had money in the bank and that bank failed you lost all the money you had deposited there. Roosevelt’s FDIC made sure that any bank deposits you made were insured by the federal government. Will doesn’t mention that either. It’s not really surprising that Will can’t manage to mention any government programs that contributed to improving out welfare over the last 150 years. His political blinders are still firmly in place.