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Politics : Right Wing Extremist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (25165)	3/30/2002 2:52:35 PM
From: Joe Btfsplk	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 59480

DE GUSTIBUS A Market Cycle: Laissez Faire Returns to PBS By CLAUDIA ROSETT It says something quite odd about the current state of our culture that when Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Daniel Yergin went looking for a way to produce the most in-depth TV miniseries in decades documenting the virtues of free markets, he didn't think he stood a chance of selling the idea to a major commercial network. Even cable was a nonstarter. So Mr. Yergin took his paean to private enterprise straight to the government-subsidized embrace of the Public Broadcasting System. And when Mr. Yergin went looking for some private-sector sponsors to help fund his project, in partnership with Boston's WGBH, the ad agency of one corporate underwriter told him that, frankly, it thought the money would be better spent buying ad time during the Super Bowl than backing Mr. Yergin's idea. Nehru, Gandhi held India's commanding heights. Its economy? Statist, alas. Still he forged ahead, and the result is "Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy." It kicks off its three-part, six-hour run April 3 on PBS, with parts two and three airing the following two Wednesdays (check local listings). The miniseries is adapted from a 1998 book of the same title, co-authored by Mr. Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw. The title phrase is poached from Lenin, who saw it as the mission of communism to seize control of the "commanding heights" -- or dominant industries -- of the economy. But never mind. At least it's a catchy metaphor -- jazzier perhaps than such laissez-faire lingo as "comparative advantage" or "marginal utility." And if there's one thing capitalism seems to need right now, it's better marketing. The peculiar fact is that, for all the huge benefits we derive from markets, the last time anyone went vigorously to bat for them on prime-time TV was 22 years ago, when Milton Friedman explained his philosophy in the PBS series "Free to Choose." Sure, we hear market advocates sounding off on TV talk shows and in places such as the columns of this newspaper. But as far as sweeping efforts to pull together the free-market saga and beam it out over the tube -- well, it's probably too soon to say if once every 22 years constitutes a trend. But what a story it is! In the first, and best, of its three segments, "Commanding Heights" opens with a question on many minds since Sept. 11: "Is global terrorism the dark side of the promise of globalization?" The show then goes back to explore what globalization means and how the modern global economy, with its awesome power to generate wealth, springs directly from the hard-won war of ideas that dominated the past century. There is in these six hours a wealth of history, argument and example that goes much further toward illuminating the real issues of globalization than any amount of World Trade Organization news footage featuring demonstrators in Goofy suits. The series, for example, takes us back to one of the great intellectual rivalries of the 20th century, between John Maynard Keynes, whose state-planning ideals dominated the West for decades, and Friedrich von Hayek, who believed that without free markets freedom itself could not survive -- and whose ideas, toward the end of the century, began to prevail. There are some nice human touches, such as the detail that the two men shared air-warden duty at Cambridge University during the Blitz, looking out for German bombers from the roof of King's College while engaging in their own combat of ideas. And there are comments from a host of economists and politicians whose thinking has shaped the new world economy. The Chicago school's Al Harberger notes that market forces "are like the wind and the tides. If you want to try to ignore them, you ignore them at your peril." Along with this comes the history -- richly conveyed by archival footage and interviews -- of the building and collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc and the rise and partial dismantling of statism in the West. The second installment focuses on "The Agony of Reform," the third on "The New Rules of the Game," including many of the problems, such as a lack of property rights, that still exclude the world's poor from the gains of global trade. This series also reminds us -- perhaps warns us -- that the last great era of world trade, with its vast promise, ended in August 1914, when the terrorist murder of an Austrian archduke launched the world into war and set it on a trajectory in which "it would be almost 80 years before there was once again a truly global economy." It seems at most a very distant threat that in trusting government to fight our new terrorist wars we might repeat such a mistake. But as Washington steers again toward greater state control -- a dreadful policy mix of more aid and less trade -- it seems worth skipping the fictional struggles of NBC's "West Wing," a lesser offering on Wednesday night, to brush up on the real lessons of history. URL for this article: online.wsj.com