Occasionally one reads an op-ed in one of the country’s big newspapers from an author, usually a Washington insider of some variety, who decided to get out and see the country he loves. The op-ed writer has taken a road trip across the country and wishes to tell his metropolitan readers about the amazing things he saw. The latest essay in this genre comes to us courtesy of Larry Summers. It ran in the Financial Times under the headline “I Discovered the Rest of America on My Summer Holiday.”
The New Haven-born Summers—professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, former director of the National Economic Council, former president of Harvard University, former Treasury secretary, former chief economist of the World Bank—drove with his wife from Chicago to Portland, Ore. “We drove for two weeks on two-lane roads,” he writes, and passed through Dubuque, Cody, and Bozeman.
Golly, we hope he sewed his name to the inside of his underwear before he left New Haven!
There wasn’t much of a point to the op-ed except to say that most people in the hinterland don’t care that much about what’s happening in Washington from day to day (the things you learn!) and that “more appreciation of that on the part of those who lead our society could strengthen and unify our country” (duly noted). But the piece managed to provoke us all the same. We supply a representative passage:
We’re not sure we understand Summers correctly, but he seems to believe that the “free market had little to do with the settling and economic progress of the American west” because the government bought the land from France. What exactly is “economic progress” if not the activity of the free market? Ah well. Leave it to one of our elite central bankers to take a road trip across the country, see the grandeur of its landscape, and encounter the rugged simplicity and exquisite heterogeneity of its people—and conclude from all of this that the U.S. government is really great.
