09.06.10
Watching the Great Recession on His Gadgets
All the special people are Tom Friedman’s friends and mentors. And they always have a book or a lecture or a plan to fix everything. Usually after they’ve spent decades as culprits to the current mess.
Plus, there’s the other thing: Tom and all his friends do not, under any circumstance, feel any pain. That’s for everyone else. The rich and famous only advise. All others are told to STFU and eat their peas.
DD doesn’t know why he read Friedman’s column on Sunday. Was it an accidental click? An inner desire for punishment? Had I not enough inspiration to get my daily crank on?
No idea.
Here’s Tom on one of his special friends and our problems, prescribing reindustrialization after he’s spent his entire career pushing for everything to be moved to China:
“The Frugal Superpower: America’s Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era??? is actually the title of a very timely new book by my tutor and friend Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert. “In 2008,??? Mandelbaum notes, “all forms of government-supplied pensions and health care (including Medicaid) constituted about 4 percent of total American output.??? At present rates, and with the baby boomers soon starting to draw on Social Security and Medicare, by 2050 “they will account for a full 18 percent of everything the United States produces.???
[Certainly an assertion the Catfood Commission can put to good use.]
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After all, Europe is rich but wimpy. China is rich nationally but still dirt poor on a per capita basis and, therefore, will be compelled to remain focused inwardly and regionally.
Mandelbaum argues for three things: First, we need to get ourselves back on a sustainable path to economic growth and reindustrialization, with whatever sacrifices, hard work and political consensus that requires.
Yes, always with great sacrifice and hard rock work for everyone down the line. And then these guys can write another book about it.
This quote from Matt Taibbi describes the practice much better than I can:
On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans.
Friedman’s one for the lynching party in “The Patriotic Class War Song.”