In an article published a few days ago titled Learning From Lance, NY Times Op-Ed Columnist Thomas Friedman, who is usually sensible about these things, goes completely off the deep end. At one point in the column he asks:
Wouldn’t you think that if you were president, after you’d read the umpteenth story about premier U.S. companies, like Intel and Apple, building their newest factories, and even research facilities, in China, India or Ireland, that you’d summon the top U.S. business leaders to Washington to ask them just one question: “What do we have to do so you will keep your best jobs here? Make me a list and I will not rest until I get it enacted.”
Now perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised to see the NY Times publishing something like this, but I am surprised to see it from Friedman, who has generally been supportive of free trade and globalization in his past writings. The question he asks here is a complete non sequitur because it assumes that there is something, anything, the government can do, in a positive sense, that can change the economic realities facing the world today. Its a story as old as Adam Smith, supply and demand are in control and when cheap labor provides a competitive advantage, companies will go after it. Even asking the question Friedman asks shows a bias toward the type of central planning that has failed all over the world.
Even more bizarre are Friedman’s opening paragraphs:
There is no doubt that Lance Armstrong’s seventh straight victory in the Tour de France, which has prompted sportswriters to rename the whole race the Tour de Lance, makes him one of the greatest U.S. athletes of all time. What I find most impressive about Armstrong, besides his sheer willpower to triumph over cancer, is the strategic focus he brings to his work, from his prerace training regimen to the meticulous way he and his cycling team plot out every leg of the race. It is a sight to behold. I have been thinking about them lately because their abilities to meld strength and strategy - to thoughtfully plan ahead and to sacrifice today for a big gain tomorrow - seem to be such fading virtues in American life.
Sadly, those are the virtues we now associate with China, Chinese athletes and Chinese leaders. Talk to U.S. business executives and they’ll often comment on how many of China’s leaders are engineers, people who can talk to you about numbers, long-term problem-solving and the national interest - not a bunch of lawyers looking for a sound bite to get through the evening news. America’s most serious deficit today is a deficit of such leaders in politics and business.
Okay, so here he’s equating Lance Armstrong with the Chinese Communists. If I were Lance, I’d be pretty upset about now.
To even use the words “virtue” and “China” together in the same paragraph is strange for Friedman. The Chinese economy is booming not because of the central planners in Beijing, but in spite of them. The planners have been there since 1949, but its only been since the introduction of free markets (albeit on a limited basis) that China has become the nation it is today. China is far from being utopia, however, as the people of Tibet, the Catholics who have to practice their religion in secret, and tens of thousands of political prisoners can attest. There is an inherent contradiction between China’s political system and its economic system. The two systems are based on mutually exclusive principles and cannot coexist together forever. One will have to give way to the other. The world could be in for quite a shock when that day comes.
I’ve gotten many recommendations for Friedman’s latest book The World Is Flat but, after reading this column, I’m not so eager to pick it up now.
