white people with blue eyes. Since they don’t believe in the free
market any more than any other rich people do, they’ll leave the
Czech Republic to pay the social costs, pollution, debts and so on,
while they pick up the profits.
It’s exactly the same with the plants GM is building in Poland,
where it’s insisting on 30% tariff protection. The free market is for
the poor. We have a dual system—protection for the rich and
market discipline for everyone else.
I was struck by an article in the New York Times whose headline
was, “Nation Considers Means to Dispose of Its Plutonium.” So the
nation has to figure out how to dispose of what was essentially
created by private capital.
That’s the familiar idea that profits are privatized but costs are
socialized. The costs are the nation’s, the people’s, but the profits
weren’t for the people, nor did they make the decision to produce
plutonium in the first place, nor are they making the decisions about
how to dispose of it, nor do they get to decide what ought to be a
reasonable energy policy.
One of the things I’ve learned from working with you is the
importance of reading Business Week, Fortune and the Wall Street
Journal. In the business section of the New York Times, I read a
fascinating discussion by a bureaucrat from MITI [Japan’s Ministry
of International Trade and Industry] who trained at the Harvard
Business School.
One of his classes was studying a failed airline that went out of
business. They were shown a taped interview with the company’s
president, who noted with pride that through the whole financial
crisis and eventual bankruptcy of the airline, he’d never asked for
government help. To the Japanese man’s astonishment, the class
erupted into applause.
He commented, “There’s a strong resistance to government
intervention in America. I understand that. But I was shocked.
There are many shareholders in companies. What happened to his
employees, for example?” Then he reflects on what he views as
America’s blind devotion to a free-market ideology. He says, “It is
something quite close to a religion. You cannot argue about it with