Writing Worth Reading
Last updated 12 pm GMT
Writing Worth Reading
‘I’ve cited this book many times in explaining to people who have looked at our approach to governance here in our little two per cent of America, Indiana. They struggle to put a label on us because we look a little different and we don’t throw around the terms that are usually used in politics. I sometimes use her nomenclature – dynamism versus stasism. There are plenty of people who we would describe as conservatives these days who are very uncomfortable with the risks and the uncertainties that come with an embrace of competition and change and simple rules.’
So let’s go on to Virginia Postrel’s book, The Future and Its Enemies, which is also the most recent of these books, written in 1998. At the time she was a young writer still in her 30s – but her fundamental distinction is not between the left and the right but between ‘stasists’ who believe in the one best way, which you impose and freeze in place with a central authority, versus ‘dynamists’, who are very comfortable with an open-ended, unpredictable social situation, where you don’t know the outcome or the single best way and you just let stuff happen.
Yes, absolutely, and I think that’s what drew me to that book. I’ve cited it many times in explaining to people who have looked at our approach to governance here in our little two per cent of America. They struggle to put a label on us because we look a little different and we don’t throw around the terms that are usually used in politics. I sometimes use her nomenclature – dynamism versus stasism. And you’re right, despite what I just said, there are plenty of people who we would describe as conservatives these days who are very uncomfortable with the risks and the uncertainties that come with an embrace of competition and change and simple rules. I think in general the Olson-like structures that we have to guard against in our country today tend to be those that favour the large interventionist state we built. I’m including here, by the way, the incumbent businesses who love the way in which it suppresses competition and puts up barriers to entry.
That’s something that Postrel points out, that these right-wing, left-wing alliances create stasis. Can you give an example?
Yes, look all around us right now – at this sudden explosion of subsidies. Look at who’s going after them in the main – it’s well-established companies, interests or industries and she would rightly see this as an unfortunate combination.
Can you be a successful politician today and argue against and fight against these kinds of subsidies, many of which are very popular?
Well, I like to feel we’ve done it and lived to tell about the tale. There are limits to our success and I’m not condemning each and every one. I was part of a large, global business for a long time – look at the behaviour of the healthcare business, that’s where I came from, a pharmaceutical business.
Eli Lilly?
That’s right. I’m very uncomfortable with the position that that industry and a couple of others have taken with regard to the recent healthcare debate. They have clearly decided that making a deal with government is in their own corporate interest, but I’m not at all convinced it’s in the national interest.
They’re trying to lock in a set of certainties and benefits.
Absolutely.
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Mitch Daniels is Governor of Indiana. He was director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George W Bush, and former head of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. He is often spoken of as a possible 2012 Presidential contender.
