Daniel Henninger has been on a roll lately. His column today continues to deliver:
A potential solution?
In order to recover this lost ideology of growth, Henninger recommends reading Reagan’s Letters, Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, and Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. Good advice! Ideas don’t die. They are just forgotten. Still, I’d add one caveat to Henninger’s column. Economic growth is a public good, but it also causes social distortions and resentment among those who do not feel that they are getting their due. Certainly intellectuals, who want to see society ordered according to their own preferences, feel left behind by a culture that takes shape according to consumer tastes expressed in the marketplace. Reagan’s talent was that he combined growth economics with a sense of civic pride. He restored the sense of American exceptionalism and grandeur that had been battered by Vietnam and the Iranian revolution. This wasn’t enough to correct the various moral deficiencies afflicting American culture. But it did give people something more than growth for growth’s sake.
