Protesting the protesters
Edward Hadas, a writer for BreakingViews.com, wonders why the protests at this week’s G20 meetings in London are so lame. He writes (paid subscription required)
The global mismanagement of the financial system has led to a deep recession. Intellectual paralysis has gripped the authorities and their policy response has been risky. After such failure, the political leaders gathered in London for the G20 conference deserve a serious challenge.
True.
Hadas’s challenge to world leaders is to compare them to the very protesters he disdains. His message is that the G20, particularly Barack Obama, are just the same kind of sloganeers and sign-wavers, with no real ability to develop a solution to the world’s problems.
Indeed, Hadas dings the world’s leaders for their spectacular failure to develop a coherent framework for political economy in the wake of the collapse of Communism. That idea seems wrong. Much of the world’s leaders adopted a framework favoring self-regulation and pushed it to its limit. It broke. He may not like the framework they had, but it was clearly powerful, seductive even. In fact, Hadas’s 2008 book, Human Goods, Economic Evils, suggests he thinks it doesn’t matter what they come up with (to be fair, I haven’t read the book, just its promotional copy).
Despite that, Hadas writes that “any protester who can articulate a coherent alternative to the establishment’s tattered notions really could change the world.” Maybe there’s room for a smart columnist to do so, too. Tom Friedman in the New York Times is pounding on the G20 to create a Market to Mother Nature approach, for instance. Paul Krugman is inspiring YouTube videos favoring him over Tim Geithner.
It is obvious that world leaders are banking on this crisis not being unresolvable, just as previous crises have seen banks recover from their insolvencies (the Latin American crisis of the 1980s, for one).
Personally, I’m glad the protests haven’t reached Weimar proportions. Maybe it means things aren’t as bad as all that.