Stepping Around

So how do you step from a parochial blog about a guy with cancer to what it used to be - stuff I was interested in, and didn't care who read it. I guess you can go in baby steps - write about other people's medical issues - health care - or doctors as an endangered profession. Or about life changes, and aging, and backwards aging - or the current distinctions between generations that seem so slight compared to the generational gap that was the crucible of the '60's...

Nah.

I'd rather go off the road entirely.

Brooks has a column today that circles around what I have long thought was the most important political issue out there. I used to put it as a thought problem in Cold War terms: what if the Soviet system worked better than ours, economically. Would we opt for that, or would we accept a lesser standard of living in order to keep our personal freedom?

The Brooks piece puts it in the 21st century context because the question is fast becoming non-hypothetical. That is, there is now a working, competing model of capitalism, especially in China - what he calls state capitalism - which may well seem more attractive to some populations than ours.

The state version may be more attractive because it makes people more personally secure, or because it is more nationalistic. It may be more collective, or cooperative, or it may require more sublimation of personal desire to the greater good. But whatever its appeal to these other ideals (if that's what they are), the rubber really meets the road if the system wins economically. If it makes people richer faster.

An older version of this was the worry about democracy, and how it could last. Lots of Greeks wondered about democracy, and posited arguments why it was bound to fail. Like the idea that the demos would eventually take over the fisc and drive out the wealth-creators, leading to dictatorship. Variations on that.

And state capitalism certainly isn't new - I had friends at Princeton who thought that state-sponsored and -guided capitalism, plus antisemitism, was fascism. And therefore, the logic ran, remove the antisemitism and you might have an interesting system.

Nontheless the debate seems new, after the triumph of the American Century and the notions that democracy is good, peace is good, free enterprise is OK because it enables democracy, and even (the neoconservative premise that few still buy) democracy makes the world more peaceful. I'm still kind of stuck there. But my guess is that this state capitalism idea will be re-branded in America, trotted before us and championed by some element of the elite. And freedom will come to seem old-fashioned and - as Jon Stewart once said to Rolling Stone - overrated.