Sometimes it’s really baffling that Thomas Friedman is considered one of our nation’s most important thinkers on political and economic matters. Here he is today (2/11/09) channeling what “non-Americans” have to say:
Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.
If you don’t understand that the United States developed its economy behind high tariff walls, then you probably believe the Earth is flat.
Try a few hundred years of slavery…
Why is Tom Friedman so rich? Well, he is married to Ann Bucksbaum Friedman, heiress to the multi-billion-dollar fortune of her family’s shopping center empire.
Is America really the wealthiest country? Seems to me it’s also the country with record external debts…
See http://www.photius.com/rankings/economy/debt_external_2007_0.html
Does it also not have one of the highest relative poverty rates among industrialized countries?
The formula does not look so good from that angle, does it?
Thanks for this blog: I’m planning to use that Friedman quote when I lecture on how state “intervention” and protectionism were crucial in the development of the economies of Western Europe, the U.S., and Japan.
I’d have to go along with Donald Lazere.
then of course there is the book-promotion-mill that the NY Times has become with all of its reporters/for its reporters.
My own view is that his persona (the one he’s using, anyway) is that of an effusive golden retriever. Lots of wag and schlurp, but doesn’t growl and get angry/barky.
Some people like that.
He’s just another of the Times reporters who, although associated with a publisher (and a really ugly building) in Manhattan, still somehow don’t know that The Salomon Building, 7 WTC, or WTC #7, also was demolished in 9/11/2001.
I think of that every time I see a nice poster sized pix of one of the twin towers been blown out–an EXplosive demolition, designed for spectacular (be afraid, be very afraid) effect–maximum terror–whereas the normal, ordinary IMplosion of WTC #7 was really just a demolition-without-a-permit.
Suire, they didn’t get the asbestos permit on #1, 2 or 7, but what the hay, are you going to cite Silverstein for failing to get a demolition permit on a day when 2,780-odd citizens got murdered? Hell, that’s just a minor administrative detail on a day meant to frighten an entire nation (world, for that matter–just think of it, the biggest, most powerful nation in the world, the best protected, best-jetted, best missiled nation in the world couldn’t even protect its own east coast.
Pretty terrifying, no? (Not to mention that the nation had obviously wasted all of its investments in the military-industrial-complex, because it couldn’t even blow four lumbering commercial passenger airlines out of the sky when it had at least 40 minutes’ notice.
And how’s that for a nation really taken to the cleaners for so-called “defense spending”!! Daddy, daddy, the Emperor has no jets!!!
Shenon’s book doesn’t mention WTC #7, for example. I haven’t bothered to read any of Friedman’s potboilers.