Neocon Hash
NY Times
An Extreme Plan for Iraq
By JEFF MADRICKIRAQ’S new finance minister, Kamel al-Gailani, announced a sweeping liberalization of his country’s economy at the annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Dubai early last week. Amid the controversy over President Bush’s request for $87 billion to finance the American presence in Iraq, the new laws hardly attracted attention in the United States.
But by almost any mainstream economist’s standard, the plan, already approved by L. Paul Bremer III, the American in charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority, is extreme — in fact, stunning. It would immediately make Iraq’s economy one of the most open to trade and capital flows in the world, and put it among the lowest taxed in the world, rich or poor. Is this Middle Eastern nation, racked by war, ready for such severe experimentation? Moreover, the radical laws have been adopted without a democratic Iraqi government to discuss or approve them.
One would have thought that the failures of swift and sudden free market changes in Russia in the 1990’s would have made even extremist economists cautious. In Russia and other nations, spontaneously freeing markets from price controls, reducing taxes and suddenly privatizing business was supposed, almost overnight, to create a thriving economy.
In a recent book, “Income and Influence: Social Policy in Emerging Market Economies” (W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research; $14), two economists, Ethan B. Kapstein and Branko Milanovic, remind us how the assumptions behind such “shock therapy” were not borne out. To the contrary, the gross domestic product continued to fall for years in most of the “reformed” nations, and eventually unemployment rose rapidly. The failure to grow immediately after the transition became, in the words of the M.I.T. economist Olivier Blanchard, “the major theoretical challenge facing economists.”
And supply side economics, which argues that low taxes are the main ingredient in motivating people to save, invest and innovate, did not even work in the United States. The economist Arthur Laffer, a member of President Ronald Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board, claimed that reduced taxes in the 1980’s would actually raise tax revenue. President Bush’s current chief economist, N. Gregory Mankiw, wrote in his widely read textbook that “subsequent history failed to confirm Laffer’s conjecture.”
But never mind such historical lessons. The Iraqi planners, apparently including the Bush administration, seem to assume they can simply wipe the slate clean.
Those poor bastards.
C’mon. We aren’t going to do this, are we?
Waddya think, Tom Friedman? Is this what you had in mind when you pounded the war drum so we could empower the moderates in the mid-east by setting such a fine example of political freedom and democratic capitalism? Did you realize that what we were really doing was buying Ahmed and his little friends a brand new country to play with?
What a good idea. It just get’s better and better every single day.