Another thought on keeping America’s edge

The essay is engaging, because it deals with conservative and liberal orthodoxy honestly. Manzi doesn’t try to argue that tax cuts and free market capitalism will lift all boats; in fact, he acknowledges it leads to greater inequality. He also doesn’t argue that the creative destruction of capitalism is without serious societal costs. Similarly, he argues that liberals need to think honestly about what more economic regulation and economic redistribution will do to America’s ability to lead in the world.

A lot of the back-and-forth has focused on the evidence Manzi uses to point to the United States’ comparative growth with Europe over the last 30 or 40 years. According to Manzi, Europe chose social democracy over a strict adherence to free markets; John Cait from the New Republic argues that Manzi’s numbers exaggerate the rising productivity gap between Europe and the United States:

… Manzi cites total share of of [sic] world GDP, which is a measure of population growth along with rising wealth. And, since 1980, the population of the United Stated has grown 35 percent, compared with 7 percent in the European Union and 0.7 percent in Russia. But of course, merely adding more people does not make your population better off. The more common measure of living standards in GDP per capita … Well, since 1980, the original 15 members of the European Union saw their real per capita income grow by 58 percent. Real per capita GDP in the United States grew by … 63 percent.

I won’t go further into the minutiae over the numbers, but I think the point missing from Manzi’s essay is an examination of what the real value of economic growth is. Pure economic growth in and of itself can’t be a worthwhile goal. Economic growth provides a lot things that as a society we like, but it can’t be the only consideration for what a republic should seek to promote. On the other hand, without economic growth we can’t experience all the things that we like in a prosperous modern state: freedom from poverty, freedom to pursue a career that fulfills us, a space in the world free from tyranny. We first need to decide what kind of country we want to live in and then try and figure out the policies to support it, whether it’s free-market liberalism, social democracy or something in between those two.

The views expressed in this blog do not represent the views or opinions of Generations United.