Spectator's Journal/Heading South

...Most recently the Japanese have proved that even their wise men are fallible, and the consequences have been terrible indeed...

...But the system forced Italians to jump through some very high hoops to create new wealth: many factories ran "black" shifts when workers were paid in cash (and they worked far more productively than during their "official" hours), and many small and medium-sized companies sprung up to compete in the international market...

...To be sure, it's a tough job, in part because most of the formerly-conventional wisdom is now upside-down, and in part because Clinton is himself so wrongheaded that it's hard to imagine his grasping what is actually going on...

...But the corruption of the Japanese system is, if anything, even worse than Italy's, and the day of reckoning will eventually arrive there as well...

...But he is quite clearly not inclined to do these things...

...The Italian case is clearer than most, because the government–big business alliance was so blatantly corrupt, but extreme cases help clarify the consequences of such an alliance...

...Every country has its "South," and most of us have followed the Italian example, by paying our Southerners (or Irish, or blacks, or Turks) to stay where they are, shut up, and not cause trouble in our neighborhoods...

...ut the most chilling lesson comes B from Italy, which Kas long been Europe's political laboratory...

...let him then talk to the welfare mothers and chastise them for bringing so many doomed children into the world...

...Postwar Italy was built on an intimate relationship between government and business, with Rome deciding which businesses should be enriched, and the spoils divided among the various political parties...

...All of this should serve as a guideline for policy toward Russia, where an entire nation is "the South...

...At the center, Europe dithers as Clinton "does foreign policy," the very language testifying to lack of content, as his spokespeople confirm "continuity in foreign policy," which is to say we shall not have much of the vision thing from this president, either...

...And when it is over, he and we will have...

...Countries once thought stable are falling apart: Czechoslovakia divided, Italy on the verge of disintegration, ex-Yugoslavia in full fission, and Russia slowly reaching critical mass...

...We ask that they appreciate us, that they give us their confidence by removing the burdens that the megastate has imposed upon us, that they trust us to spend our money at least as wisely as they can, and that they provide us with examples of courage, culture, and probity...

...In real terms this means it wants to end the postwar policy of paying off the Southerners to stay put—another aspect of the social-engineering state...

...This policy—along with similarly idiotic subsidies for favored companies in West Germany—has driven Germany into economic crisis, proving once again that even the strongest economic, system can be gutted by an excess of central planning...

...The most recent converts to this foolish system are the Germans, who are expending a fortune to keep the East Germans where they are, subsidizing nonproductive industries, subsidizing housing, subsidizing most everything...

...Over time, the Mafia became part of this game, generating even more money...

...a testimony to the staying power of an ethnically homogeneous society with a strong social tradition...

...Above all, let him fulfill his most important campaign promise and reduce the weight of bureaucracy...

...With Italy passing England to become the world's fifth industrial power, most Italians preferred to leave well enough alone, even though they knew the system was crazy...

...The Second Democratic Revolution has so far toppled the military dictatorships of Latin Europe and Latin America, sent the Soviet Empire to the dustbin of history, frightened the gerontarchs in Peking, and inspired much of Africa, but our leaders have yet to grasp its true import...

...Otherwise, stay out, because no amount of money can save Russia as presently constituted...

...Let him chastise the school teachers and university administrators who have caved in to fad instead of maintaining the timeless standards that alone produce educated citizens...

...The system survived for several generations, for while everyone knew that the taxpayers were paying a high premium (perhaps as much as 30 percent of some contracts was recycled to the parties), it provided lots of jobs (in both government and big business...

...It is difficult to tell, for example, whether he really believes in the forecasts of Global Warming (sometimes he accepts it as proven, other times he writes about what might ensue "if it is accurate"), and here and there one finds an encouraging humility about prophecy...

...It wants the Southerners to stay put without being paid...

...Moreover, the alternative to the system was Communism, and this was unacceptable to the majority of Italians...

...For the Second Democratic Revolution, as its eighteenth-century progenitor, is inspired by faith in the creative powers and energies of the individual, and resists the arrogant and stifling powers of the state...

...If the channels of upward mobility are sufficiently open, they will generally find a way out of their plight...

...You can't have capitalism without private property, and you can't have a modern economic system without fully convertible currency...

...The formerly-conventional wisdom rested on the assumption that "stability" was central to our foreign policy objectives, and hence we had to "manage" crises...

...Sound familiar...

...Indeed, he is hell-bent on taking the opposite course, and that will lead him where it has led the others...

...Yeltsin blew his big chance after the failed coup attempt that swept aside the Communist Party, and now faces a resurgent old guard and a cynical populace...

...The new president would do well, to pay attention to France, where Francois Mitterrand's Socialists have received the most resounding defeat in the history of electoral politics...

...The map of the world was considered fundamentally stable, with only minor variations (particularly in and around Israel) possible or even desirable...

...That they start at a disadvantage is no excuse for massive government intervention that only prolongs their agony...

...There is very little private property in Russia today, and such as exists is either the result of wildcat entrepreneurship or the occasionalprivatization of big state-owned companies...

...The present state of liberal confusion is well demonstrated in Paul Kennedy's latest tome, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century.1 It is a book that does not parse, because—perhaps stung by the colossal errors of his last opus, in which he forecast the demise of the American "Empire," andopined that both Japan and the Soviet Union had greater stability—all bets are hedged...

...paid a high price for the foolishness of intellectual hubris, and hopefully there will still be time for us to reassert our revolutionary principles and reenter the mainstream of modern history...

...Around the periphery, the teeming masses are restless, now rallying to the banner of Islam, now to ancient ethnic, tribal, or racial loyalties, now again to nations believed long gone...

...That is why the European leaders are in such disrepute with their electors, and it is why Clinton's negative ratings are rising like the incoming tides...

...In this century alone, the Italians have given us Fascism and Eurocommunism, and now they are showing us what happens when the populace turns on the stato ladro, the thief-state...

...But insofar as Kennedy is inclined to prescribe (aside from anodyne calls for better education, greater opportunities for women, and better political leadership), it is to weaken nation-states in order to strengthen larger governing units with even more power to shape policy and hence to regulate human behavior...

...If they did, they could not possibly continue to speak and act as if more government were the solution to most of mankind's problems...

...The Pope, it is said, has forecast that the last Communist will be an American nun, but she will have to compete with some resilient survivors in our academies and think tanks, many of whom are now taking up residence in the federal government...

...Nowhere is there an appreciation of the enormous political energies that have been unleashed in the recent past, and nowhere is there a recognition of the great cry for freedom that inspires our time...

...Today the Italian political and business elite is either in jail or dreading it...

...Yeltsin is asking for money to save his "reform program," but the reforms he is calling for are timorous, and more in line with the failed Italian model than with the norms of democratic capitalism...

...It is astonishing that the political fallout from the Japanese economic nightmare has not been more pronounced (imagine what would happen here if the stock market crashed by 60 percent...

...This theory comes from the intellectual elite of American liberalism, a hoary anachronism in the Age of the Second Democratic Revolution...

...The president believes in government, wants a more intimate alliance between government and business, thinks that a bunch of clever people can outguess the market, and insists that the government be given more and more money so that it can make more and more decisions...

...T he notion that government is smarter than the people, and should guide investment, R&D, and production, is not limited to countries with "Southern" problems...

...And the central role of government in managing all problems went unchallenged...

...It is most unlikely that the Clinton administration will adopt such a policy, because we seem about to repeat the mistakes that have so badly damaged the Italians, Germans, and Russians...

...If we're going to invest in the Russian future, we'd better insist that Yeltsin find a way to blow up these massive roadblocks...

...Thus, alongside the planned economy, a free market developed, and this free sector drove the Italian economic miracle to spectacular levels...

...Mitterrand lingers on, but as an enthroned anachronism, a reminder of failures past...

...In Italy today, the traditional political parties have been destroyed and a new force, the Lombard League, has emerged...

...The book is not so much an essay as a compendium of all the things that might go wrong in the near future (population explosions, ecological disaster, war, famine . . . the usual collection), and it is woefully short on remedy...

...With the defeat of Communism, this barrier was removed, and the judiciary swung into action...

...The only sensible solution to the problem of the "South" is to get government out of people's way and let them compete with the rest of us...

...The president fancies himself a modern populist, taking his show on the road more often than facing the press in Washington...

...hat do we ask of our leaders in W the age of revolution...

...In the current revolutionary convulsion, stability is out of the question, and we must either lead the worldwide movement that we inspired despite ourselves, or face the whirlwind of an embittered generation that will condemn our betrayal...

...The League represents northern Italy (anything above Rome), and wants independence or at least greater autonomy...

...The point is not to manage the world, it is to change it...

...The Communists were double-dippers, taking some money from the system, and other funding from Moscow and related business activities in pro-Soviet Third World_ countries...