What do Pat Buchanan, Gloria Steinem, Ralph Nader, and Phyllis Schlafly have in common? Answer: They'd probably all hate this book. According to Virginia Postrel, what unites these political figures and many other people today is a shared, reflexive fear of a future in which no one is in charge. Right-wing reactionaries, left-wing environmentalists, busy-body technocrats, anti-free-trade unionists and others all hold strong to the belief that social activity - in almost any arena - must be consciously directed by a central authority whose job it is to design one-size-fits-all solutions to everything from child care to the Internet to trade policy to urban growth. Postrel's thesis is that all of this is bullshit.
Buchanan, Steinem, and company may seem like strange bedfellows; indeed, in many respects they are. But they each, in the author's words, "see contemporary life as a problem demanding immediate action by the powerful and wise." Postrel's term for this kind of thinking is "stasist." Stasists fear changes, especially if no one "powerful and wise" is in the driver's seat. One particular issue that tellingly united them several years ago was the free-trade agreement known as GATT. Visions of jobless Americans forced into poverty by unfair competition from abroad, fears of exploited foreign laborers toiling away in sweatshops for subsistence wages -- these were and are the boogymen of those who fear economic freedom, either on the left or the right. But those gloomy specters have been shown to be baseless fantasies time and again.
Example: in the early 80s when Detroit began exporting jobs to Mexico (our auto companies couldn't remain competitive with the Japanese and pay the exorbitant wages demanded by American unions), anti-free-trade Cassandras predicted these very same things - lost American jobs, exploited foreigners, economic downturn. Yes, lots of American auto workers did lose their jobs, but surprise, surprise - they got other jobs! (And no, not at McDonald's, either.) American consumers got better, cheaper cars. And the new Mexican autoworkers weren't bitching about the situation either. And no recessions were to be found.
Joseph Schumpeter, the economist, once referred to capitalism as a system of "creative destruction." It's destructive because it is creative. New methods and technologies displace old ones. Proponents of the old ways lose out - in the short run. But in the long run everybody is better off. Don't think so? Try emigrating to Cuba or North Korea. You'll find lots of people there who've been propagandized to agree with you. They don't get to eat very often, but they agree with you.
It would be an oversimplification to equate Postrel's philosophy with capitalism, but the kind of creative, chaotic activity that characterizes her view, which she calls "dynamism," is perhaps most easily exemplified by free enterprise. Its intellectual origins are more diverse. "Dynamic thought in fact draws on many intellectual traditions: classical-liberal philosophy and legal theory; several different strands of economics; the history of science and (a separate enterprise) of technology; ecology and evolutionary biology; the study of organizations and business strategy; even aspects of cognitive psychology and computer science."
The exemplar of dynamist thinking in this era is the Internet. Nobody controls it. No one could have predicted its phenomenal growth, much less laid out a plan for the thing. It's a classic example of what happens when unfettered innovation meets rational self-interest: a flowering of value-creation. As one reader of Postrel's book put it beautifully in a customer review at amazon.com:
"Years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine the idea of a transparent online marketplace where you could read a compilation of book reviews from both experts and ordinary readers, and if you liked what they had to say, have the book sent to you just by clicking a button. No Washington sage planned out a World Wide Web with sites like Amazon and eBay. It just spontaneously evolved when entrepreneurs began pushing the limits of new technology. The result of this decentralized process is pretty spectacular. This is exactly the point, argues Postrel. The best things in life always emerge in a laissez-faire environment."
Laissez-faire is the key word here. Forget the liberal boilerplate in high school history texts calling laissez-faire "socially regressive." That party line has been handed down by left-wing hacks since the 1920s. Genuinely free market economics, as opposed to the welfare state mixed economies here and in Europe, are at the cutting edge, not past history. After foundering for decades with statist (and stasist) policies, Chile, New Zealand, Ireland and others have advanced free market reforms in recent, with happy results.
A couple of years ago on the West Mall, the University Libertarians used to hand out a political quiz. Consisting of about a dozen questions, it sought to place respondents not only on a one-dimensional spectrum of left versus right but also on another dimension running perpendicular to it: authoritarian vs. libertarian. No doubt about it, Postrel, who is editor of the free-market magazine Reason, would definitely score as a libertarian. But "dynamism" is not a libertarian philosophy, per se. Dynamists aren't afraid of making judgments.
Whereas many libertarians would as soon embrace the welfare state as cast a moral judgment on someone else's lifestyle, dynamists have no problem pointing out someone who has his head up his ass. But like the libertarians, dynamists won't run to the police and make him pull it out for his own good. "The dynamist moral vision, then, emphasizes individual flourishing and individual responsibility. It sees human nature fulfilled in learning, creating, and adapting to the world. " If this sounds like some kind of trendy Californian philosophy, well, maybe it is. But cheer up, it's pro-liberty and anti-big government. And, if Postrel is correct, it's self-correcting as well.
According to Postrel, "the true enemies of humanity’s future are those who insist on prescribing outcomes in advance, circumventing the process of competition and experiment in favor of their own preconceptions and prejudices." If you disagree with Postrel's vision, no problem. Lots of Pat Buchanans and Ralph Naders in the world are waiting in the wings to take control.