Déjà vu all over again

What would Kenneth Boulding think of George W. Bush?
LEIGH POMEROY

Once a staunch Republican, Kenneth Boulding (1910-1993) quit the GOP in 1982 in a rather spectacular way: By writing President Reagan and announcing it in the press. If Boulding were a Joe Nobody, this would not have made a difference. But Boulding was one of the leading economists of his day.

According to a press release issued by the University of Southern California, where he was lecturing at the time, Boulding confessed,

"I wrote President Reagan that I joined the party because it was the party of conservatism. And I believe in the profit system. I told him I cannot stay in the party now that it is being run by radicals."

He defined a radical as "someone who thinks he can do good without knowing anything about it," then characterized the current administration as "the most radical in the nation's history."

Boulding, former president of the American Economic Association, accused the administration of inviting economic collapse by pursuing an unprecedented peacetime military buildup without comparable taxation and at the risk of continuing budget deficits.

He further indicted the administration for weakening the economy by seeming to condone mergers and "financial manipulation" rather than "the healthy seeking of profit from productivity."

Boulding's primary criticism was of the GOP fueling the U.S.-Soviet arms race, which was still in full force at the time. Boulding continued,

"The Soviet Union is basically an obsolete, 19th-century empire. It's going to dissolve like all the other 19th-century empires if we just give it time.

"I think the Soviet government will probably evolve into a more representative system within, at most, 30 years. Just look at how much change has occurred in a relatively short time in China, Yugoslavia and many Soviet satellites....

"The trouble with the leaders of the Reagan administration is that they seem to believe Marxist propaganda. They act as if they think communism is really the wave of the future, when the communist system is actually a clunker."

Boulding's words turned out to be prophetic, as only seven years later, in 1989, came the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Had Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. not been so trigger happy three years ago, I am convinced that with the right amount of cooperative diplomatic pressure we might well have been rid of Saddam Hussein by this time, saving thousands of American and Iraqi lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. As Boulding prophesied about the Soviet Union, the Saddam-run Iraqi state was unsustainable in the new age of globalism.

Regrettably, we cannot go back in time. And right now all the options pertaining to Iraq lead to a lose-lose scenario. The question is: Which would be least painful? And to whom?

Would our wise old friend Professor Boulding have an answer? It's hard to tell. What could be the unfortunate truth, however, is that the opportunity to make a correct decision might well be long passed.

(For a previous discussion of Kenneth Boulding's prophetic abilities, see "Did Kenneth Boulding predict our current political crisis?" published 3/18/06 on Vox Verax.)