As a former teacher I learned one thing that proved to apply
in more places than I imagined. I learned never to judge a book by its cover, a
lesson that later proved to apply in other fields as well; not least of which
the tendency to predict what the future of a student will be, judging by his
school performance during the few months that you have him in your class. The
only certainty you can rely on in such cases is that you will be wrong most of
the time.
Even before that, as I went into the world where I saw many
things, got involved with many of them and became a lifelong student of the
human condition, one fallacy stood out as the most glaring from among the
tendencies that some people develop. It is that they obsess about creating a
rating system according to criteria they imagine will encapsulate the truth.
And so they establish an index, rate people or nations accordingly, and project
a picture of the world they want the rest of us to believe is the gospel truth.
Nothing can be more false than that.
You can get a feel for all that when you read the James
Pethokoukis article that came under the title: “No. 12 in the Index of Economic
Freedom” and the subtitle: “We rank behind Estonia, but if we had a true
accounting, we'd be even lower on the list.” It was published on January 21,
2014 in National Review Online.
As you can see, the subtitle alone points to two matters
that should raise your eyebrow. The first is that the author of the article
does not believe there is true accounting, which causes you to ask: Why then is
he wasting his time discussing a subject he knows is false? And the second is
that a great deal of emotion is involved in what is supposed to be a
mathematically precise gauging of things. And that emotion is without a doubt
of the worst kind because it rests on the xenophobic tendency to resent being
in the company of say, Estonia .
Pethokoukis begins with the lamentation that America “down,
down, down she goes” according to the ranking of economic freedom that the
Heritage Foundation put together in collaboration with the Wall Street Journal
some twenty years ago. And he blames what he calls Obamanomics for the trouble,
a point that should tell the reader, there is a great deal of politics in them
words.
But then he goes on to say that the analysis and the ranking
are “too charitable” toward the current American economy, and too harsh toward
the President. What? Is he now saying that Obamanomics isn't as bad as the
analysis made it out to be? Hey, did you hear that, you Heritage Foundation?
And you Wall Street Journal? Pethokoukis says you're wrong.
To make his point, the author of the article compares the
economy of boogeyman “social-democratic” Sweden
with that of America , and
finds that Sweden clearly
beats America in seven of
the subcategories that make up the index of Economic Freedom, yet it is ranked
number 20 while America
is ranked as number 12.
But wait a minute, that's not the whole story because when
you closely analyze the 3 categories where America beats Sweden – which he
thoroughly does – you find that “if government spending were calculated in [a]
more transparent way, the U.S would fall to Swedish levels if not a bit lower.
Likewise, if Sweden spent
the way the index thinks the U.S.
does, it would take America 's
spot behind Estonia .”
Worse than that, says Pethokoukis, there is this fact: “Not
only does America have
market-distorting government as big as Sweden ’s; it runs a welfare state
that's heavily targeted toward the top rather than the middle or bottom.” To
buttress this point, he quotes Monica Prasad who wrote: “the United States is not a
laissez-faire or liberal political economy at all, and never has been.”
To which James Pethokoukis adds his own observation: “It's a
worst-of-all worlds situation, and it didn't start with the Affordable Care Act
and Dodd-Frank” which is probably why he said earlier that Obamanomics isn't as
bad as the heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal made it sound.