Jonah Goldberg, National Review
I have been over into the future, and it works.'
Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, offered that review of the Soviet Union on his return from a fact-finding mission there. For decades, conservatives invoked that line as proof that a generation of progressives were Soviet fellow-travelers. Conservatives were far from entirely wrong, but the focus on Communism obscured a more enduring dynamic: The Left loves to press its nose against the window on the world and talk about how things are better over there.'
...like butterflies always looking for a prettier flower, these intellectuals keep flitting to the next proof' of America's shortcomings. For some, such as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, the prettiest flower out there right now is China. For others, it's France or Canada. For the truly demented, it's Cuba.
The problem with all such efforts is that they look abroad solely for what they wish to see at home. For instance, in an effort to push its green agenda, the Obama administration likes to tout the farsighted vision of Spain, which has invested heavily in windmills and other renewable technology. Never mind that today, Spain's economic crisis is just slightly less dire than Greece's and politicized bets on green technology contributed to its problems....
Tom Friedman has gone so far as to wish America could be China for a day' and to suggest that its enlightened' regime is preferable to our own. It's not that Friedman wants to abolish democracy, jail dissidents, or force abortions. He's more like a drunk looking for his car keys where the light is good. He sees a nation doing things he thinks America should be doing, but doesn't look for what he doesn't want to see: the pollution, the cruelty, the lies and basic evil that are just as central to China's methods as its enlightened' investments in this or that.
What unites all of these people is a form of power worship. These foreign governments and their experts have control over citizens and economies sometimes through democratic consent, sometimes not that the state doesn't have in America. Thus proving American backwardness.
Perhaps we're not backward at all. Maybe America simply values economic freedom over economic security more than most countries do.
Regardless, the track record of such control, over the long haul, is abysmal, particularly in comparison with America's more unplanned approach (indeed, the world's planned economies often feed off American innovation to survive). The Soviets are in the dustbin of history; Japan Inc. is in its second lost decade'; Europe is in an economic crisis; China's problems are hard to see because Beijing likes it that way. We have our own problems, but history shows that the solution to them is not to be found in more centralized planning.... 
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