John Kenneth Galbraith Is Dead

From A Stitch in Haste:

Many reformers -- Galbraith is not alone in this -- have as their basic objection to a free market that it frustrates them in achieving their reforms, because it enables people to have what they want, not what the reformers want.
--Milton Friedman

It will be interesting (to use a euphemism) to read the flood of commentary, most of which will be glowing if not apotheosizing, on the death of John Kenneth Galbraith, especially from the new wave of ultra-liberal would-be central planner economists such as Robert Frank and Paul Krugman.

(SIDEBAR: Galbraith was literally a central planner -- he ran the Office of Price Administration during World War II ... and failed miserably at it. He was the closest this country ever came to a real-life Wesley Mouch. See also this post.)

I can't curse or damn Galbraith the way he probably deserves to be cursed and damned. Yes, he was about as radical a leftist as one can be in polite society. Yes he legitimized Keynesian interventionism to Washington in the 1950s. Yes he designed and propagandized the Great Society. Yes he was just plain wrong in just about everything he believed as an economist.

But he was no Paul Krugman and he was no Robert Frank.

Galbraith was a liberal in the sense that Danial Patrick Moynihan was, rather than the way Ted Kennedy is today. He saw economic and sociological trends that were completely new and that had admittedly ominous implications. He sought to understand and explain -- and warn about, if necessary -- the modern world that was emerging around him. He did what too few economists do: he looked forward rather than backward.

If you were to shoot one and only arrow into Galbraith's theories, it should be this: He lamented the supposed foolhardiness of consumers, who in his view are too easily manipulated by advertising and are innately controlled by the need to "keep up with the Joneses," yet he ignored the ability of politicians to engage in the very manipulation that he accused corporate America of committing. He bought into the Big Lie and fell into the trap of the "politician as enlightened public servant" combating the "corporate executive as soulless agent of greed and exploitation." And in the process inspired two generations of liberals to do likewise.

Once you start down that road of "some preferences are more legitimate than others" and "consumers are stupid," then all the rest follows. Soon you are dismissing some preferences as illegitimate, or unimportant, or counterproductive. Then come the targeted taxes, the subsidies, the regulations -- and the Politics of Pull.

To his credit, Galbraith was not a fan of the mathematization of economics; that entitles him to at least some level of redemption. One wonders, though, whether all those who will now idolize him as an "iconoclast" will afford others who also denounce the elevation of economic models over economic ideas the same respect.