Bull Market In Politics

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Frighteningly enough, the humans active the apple are about children. Think about the Supreme Court clerks who, for several decades, accept all but bent the advance of American jurisprudence, or the fresh-faced thirtysomethings who are active the Troubled Asset Relief Program. These kids are absolutely bright, but there is annihilation added alarming than alive your approaching is in the easily of some belled dement you knew from your canicule in the top academy bathe yodeling club.

I’ve been having this vague sense of dread a lot lately. The older I get, the more I sense that no one really knows anything--the supposed experts, however earnest or well-intentioned, are performing an elaborately fraudulent ritual designed to keep us assured. But like it or not, the kids are going to have morepower rather than less, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

In a short essay published in Swiss Hedge magazine earlier this year, Robertson Morrow of Clarium Capital argued that the U.S. is at the beginning of a “bull market in politics.” Since 1982, government has not been where the action is, so to speak. The most ambitious and capable young people have generally frowned upon politics, sensing that they had more lucrative and intellectually challenging opportunities in the business world. But now, for a wide variety of reasons, that is changing.

Morrow believes that the driver of the new political bull market is the fact that the American economy is squeezed between China and India on one hand and advanced European and East Asian markets on the other. America’s entrepreneurial strengths won’t necessarily generate middle-class jobs quickly enough to prevent policymakers from embracing heavy-handed industrial policy.

This weekend, President-elect Barack Obama announced a sweeping jobs program, one that places infrastructure improvements front and center. Though this is a recession-fighting solution that many conservatives, myself included, embrace, there is no telling where this desire to reshape the economy will stop. My own view is that the political bull market also reflects a structural increase in the appetite for government.

In his brilliant book The Venturesome Economy--which I hope to discuss in a future column--Amar Bhidé briefly argues that major developments in technology, like the automobile or air travel or the Internet, create new coordination problems that government is well placed to solve. Then there is the fact an economy like ours has a lot of high-wage jobs in declining sectors, which is to say a lot of vulnerable workers with much to lose; this is a political fact that can’t be wished away by a million anti-bailout op-eds. I am absolutely against propping up dying industries, not least because pointless and counterproductive interventions waste intellectual capital that can be expended on badly needed interventions.

Given that we’re living in an activist era, it makes sense to think more about how we can make government smarter and more agile, and that means thinking about personnel. Are the people devising the public policies that will determine the future success of our economy ideological imbeciles or humble realists?