The Reticulator

Don Bordreaux at Cafe Hayek says:

A headline in today’s Wall Street Journal reads “Obama Details Effort to Double Exports Over Five Years.”

Translation: “Obama Details Effort to Increase Corporate Welfare Over Five Years.”

Or more loosely paraphrased, “Obama panders to special interests.”

A few days ago I finished Sergei Khrushchev’s book, “Nikita Khrushchev and the creation of a superpower.”

I wish he had had as much to say about the Soviet Union’s domestic economy as he did about missiles and the space race. Maybe I’ll find some of that in his other books, though I it’s understandable where his emphasis lay given that his own job was in the missile industry.

He does give some tantalizing descriptions of how industrial planning worked in the 1950s and 1960s. And he provides plenty of evidence that his father understood very well the relationship between the domestic economy and the USSR’s prowess in military and space technology.

And he introduced me to someone I had not known about: Yevsei Liberman.

Liberman, a pragmatist, came very close to understanding the need to introduce a market economy, calling it material self-interest; but as someone who had grown up while an irreconcilable struggle was being waged against any manifestations of freedom in the economy, he could not bring himself to pronounce the seditious word.

I went to Google to learn more. So far I’ve found contradictory information. The New York Times obituary in 1983 said, “Although Mr. Khrushchev evidently endorsed the proposals, they were not put into practice until after Leonid I. Brezhnev succeeded to the Soviet leadership in 1964.” But other sources say his proposals were eviscerated before being implemented. I’m now looking for a book to read that can help explain this. What I’d really like is one that can give accounts that are close to the action and personal, like Sergei Khruschev’s, but I’ll probably have to settle for less.

It’s bad enough that one of these years I’ll have to retire from my day job. But to make it worse, there is the existence of things such as Boston College’s “Center for Retirement Research.” That in itself isn’t the worst of it. The worst is that it’s led by a director, Alicia Munnell, who has this to say in last weekend’s WSJ:

The 401(k) system has had a chance, and in my view, it has failed. As a major shource of retirement income, it has shown itself unreliable–a point the financial crisis has driven home.

For the record, my own retirement savings are not in a 401K, but in TIAA-CREF. But TIAA-CREF is similar in that it’s another defined-contribution system. Those plans are hated by people who hate markets and human choice. Here’s an example of the attitude you find, from the same WSJ article.

We’ve shifted the risk and responsibility for retirement onto individuals. The evidence is at best mixed on how well this is working out.

Somebody has a government-centric outlook on life, it would appear, if he views individual risk and responsibility as an aberration.

To be sure, not all of the WSJ article is anti-choice. There are some pro-choice proposals to make 401(k)s better and more available. But there are plenty of people who just don’t like humans taking over the government’s job of running their lives.

Their solution? Turn investment decisions and planning over to the financial geniuses who now want to invest in GM and the Big Three.