John Tamny on What Went Right

I started this blog about a week ago to discuss Robert Tracinski's What Went Right. Yesterday morning I took a break from posting because I wasn't quite sure what my next post should be and instead decided to catch up on my favorite blogs. One of them is John Tamny's column on Forbes.com, and to my surprise, three of his recent posts are related to the subject of What Went Right.

The first is a book review of The Seven Fat Years which came out in 1992 and which Tamny describes as "one of the greatest economics books ever written." The "seven fat years" refers to the years 1983-1990 when Reagan's policies of increased economic freedom paid off and the economy grew in leaps and bounds. In Tamny's history, the '60s and '70s were a time of economic errors and low growth, but then the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years were boom times resulting from more economic freedom and better money policy. But then we took a downturn with Bush II and Obama with their inflationary money policies, increased federal spending, and more regulations.

I agree with Tamny's assessment, and I believe most of "what went right" since the 1980s--as described by Tamny and Tracinski--were the results of better economic policy in the eighties and nineties. Tracinski cites the fall of communism and the spread of global capitalism as two major, positive events. Both can be linked to the increased prosperity of the '80s. The Soviet Union went bankrupt, in part by trying to keep up with the arms race against America in the 1980s.  And countries like India and China would not have been motivated to move toward market economies if they hadn't seen the wealth produced in the '80s and '90s.

The second post from Tamny is a rebuttal to the many columns by Mark Steyn on the imminent demise of America. I've read Steyn's book After America, and while quite entertaining, it is also quite depressing as Steyn shows how America has declined over the last century and makes a convincing case that we're headed in the wrong direction. Stein's foreboding of doom is similar to that of Peikoff and other present-day Objectivists, although his arguments are less philosophical.

Tamny's argument against collapse is that America, thanks to the power of capitalism, is stronger than the doomsayers realize. "It's fun and easy to join a centuries old echo chamber about how lazy we've all become, but the facts are that the U.S. is still full of the most brilliant, productive, and innovative people on earth," he writes.  He goes on to say that America could be so much richer and stronger if we didn't have the government interference, which is a shame.  As it stands now, capitalism is so far keeping pace with the bad economic policies and horrid monetary policy in order to give America low to modest growth.

I completely agree with Tamny on this point.  As I see it, the history of America for the last hundred years has been a see-saw battle between socialism and capitalism, with the American people alternating their votes between the two: as one becomes stronger, they vote for the other and reverse the trend.

The third column by Tamny is a review of the movie Atlas Shrugged: Part II. His review of the movie isn't the important part (although he liked it), but rather the fact that he read Atlas Shrugged in 1994 while in college. From this column, we learn that he is a fan of Ayn Rand, and that he has accepted some of her ideas. This, I believe, is also part of "what went right." Even though Ayn Rand isn't taught in the Philosophy departments at Harvard or Yale, she is still having an important and significant impact on the culture.

As I discussed in a previous post, Ayn Rand outlined how ideas have influenced the culture since the advent of capitalism:  from philosophy professor to other college professors and then on down from there. But since Ayn Rand published her unique philosophy in the form of the novel rather than as a philosophy text book, people have had another avenue to learn philosophical ideas. During the nineties, after I read Atlas Shrugged, I often checked bookstores to see if they carried Ayn Rand. Most of them did, and some of them even had Atlas Shrugged in the Classics section.  Now with amazon.com, forbes.com and the rest of the internet, access to ideas has never been greater. Perhaps we can change the world without changing the Philosophy departments at Harvard and Yale.