An elegant essay by Theodore Dalrymple on legendary lofty US economist J K Galbraith.

Needless to say, what caught my eye was reference to a book JGK wrote in 1958, Journey to Poland and Yugoslavia.

As a fine, prosperous East Coast liberal from a democracy, JKG was disinclined to see what if anything might be wrong with these one-party communist states:

The main function of what Galbraith writes is to minimize the horrors of Communism, upon which he has hardly a word. Indeed, strict political control never intrudes much on his consciousness when he is in the Communist world. “I have generally avoided quoting by name my Polish . . . sources in this account,” he writes. “This is not because I have any great fear of compromising them. Many people . . . take no small pride in speaking plainly and do so without evident restraint.”

Other priceless observations follow. Noticing the drabness with which people are dressed, Galbraith remarks that it “may be the problem of socialism. Planners can provide for everything but color, and they cannot allow for that because so much of it is associated with idiocy great and small. In any case, the people of Poland have more liberty than variety.”

Under Soviet-imposed socialism you are free, Poles!

Free, that is, in general, which is the main thing. Just not in particular, which could be most disadvantageous.

One of the great advantages of Galbraith-style planning is the elimination of “idiocy great and small,” of the kind that people are apt to embrace when they have the choice. The solution: eliminate choice. You can have any color you like, so long as it’s chosen by the philosopher-king.

Later he went to China and somehow missed the fact that millions of people had been wiped out in the Cultural Revolution and preceding famines caused by Mao’s policies:

Nor was Galbraith interested in who the Red Guards were or what they actually did. The fate of individual people was far beneath his notice, which explains why his anecdotes are so rarely interesting, let alone illuminating. His is a humanitarianism without a human face.

The point now?

Galbraith has come back into fashion: not only his ideas, which imply the need for a huge and expanding class of redemptory politicians and bureaucrats to save people from a fate that would be wretched without them, but his aristocratic assumption of unchallengeable moral superiority, written in his prose as it appears to be written on President Obama’s face.

How delightful to be so generous, so very right all the time, and yet make a fortune and stay at the Ritz!

Read the whole piece – a deft demolition of JKG’s bewilderingly idiotic idea that business/markets are inherently ruthless, governments inherently benign:

There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen—their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading—he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats.