Is Tom Friedman the Most Overrated and Disgraceful Journalist in America?

[JHB]

42. Particular things that stood out for me:

1) Jumping to extreme alternatives: North Korea, Communism, giving up all modern gadgetry. As if there are no alternatives, as if you can't incentivize economic behavior in any way other than is done right now, even though we've done so in the past. "Where's this Golden Era?" Nobody said anything about a "golden era", but there were some things that were handled differently in the past and maybe we should take a second look at them, especially given #2:

2) the bland rewriting of history: "first we tried one thing, it went to far, now we're trying something else..." as if the deregulation, extreme tax cutting, and privatization that started under Carter but got rocket boosters under Reagan had been rationally debated, and was not the result of political power plays. I recall Reagan making speeches about how lowering taxes at the high end would let that money be used for investment to modernize our aging industrial plant to restore our competitiveness in markets at home and abroad. Instead, that money went into the stock market and fueled Merger-mania, leveraged buy-outs that let company assets be stripped and sucked upward, and union-busting. More bait-and-switch than the swinging of a pendulum, especially considering that the pendulum never swung back.

3) Did you notice how he went completely ballistic when she noted he was a rich guy? As if that was just prying into his personal business, and had no bearing on the perspective from which he evaluates these issues? That it might affect his view of budgetary priorities? Easy enough for him to talk about raising the retirement age when to him it is of no more significance than adjusting the bass on a stereo, but for tens of millions of people there might be a higher incentive to look at other alternatives.

4) The way he kept wondering aloud what her agenda was, what she "was getting at", largely because her reaction to his pearls of wisdom was not simple ooh-ing and ahhh-ing.

And a plug for blogger Driftglass, also of The Professional Left Podcast, who originally made me aware of the interview.