Canamerican Dies. The great Canadian-born American economist and diplomat John Kenneth Galbraith died last nite, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 97. The world is poorer today.
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It's hard to complain at someone's passing at age 97, but after reading his obituary, I was more upset than I thought I'd be.

He was one of America's best-known liberals, and he never shied away from the label.

"There is no hope for liberals if they seek only to imitate conservatives, and no function either," Galbraith wrote in a 1992 article in Modern Maturity, a publication of the American Association of Retired Persons.

One of his most influential books, "The Affluent Society," was published in 1958.

It argued that the American economy was producing individual wealth but hasn't adequately addressed public needs such as schools and highways. U.S. economists and politicians were still using the assumptions of the world of the past, where scarcity and poverty were near-universal, he said.

We still have not adjusted to the fact that scarcity is a thing of the past for rich countries like the United States, Europe, and Japan. We are still eating as tho we need to store up a layer of fat against the next famine. And the dehumanizing poverty of the Third World, coupled with occasional reminders, like a gasoline-price jump, that economics can bring unpleasant surprises, tends to make us more defensive than generous.
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But sharing the wealth is the best way of preserving our wealth, and a healthy human race prosperous and free makes this planet a far safer place for everyone to be. That is Liberalism: common sense touched by grace.
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Last nite, this benited planet lost a champion of Liberalism. With his passing went another piece of Camelot, that wonderful time in our history when John Kennedy was in the White House and all was right with the world. Oh, there were bad problems, but the world seemed then to be filled with potentiality. The cream of society, in the sense of people who understood that talent and wealth have to be used for the greater good, had risen to the top.
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No one has that feeling about the White House today. Instead, it seems to most Liberals at home and most people of all political outlooks abroad, that the scum of American society has risen to the top.
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Any pond can use a certain amount of algae, and some fish do feed on it. But nobody's eating our pond scum — no Soylent Green here — so we are being asphyxiated by a political algae bloom, a red (state) tide that is poisoning society with greed and short-sighted selfishness.
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Where is today's JFK?
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John Kenneth Galbraith and John Fitzgerald Kennedy made a powerful team, and the history of the world might have been very different if Galbraith had stayed in Canada instead of moving to the U.S. shortly after graduating from the University of Toronto. Would he have made as much of a contribution had he remained in Canada? Dubious.
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For one thing, he would never have been U.S. Ambassador to India. Maybe the U.S.-India relationship today would not be as far along as it has come without his years there.
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How many other Canadians are there who can fulfil their destiny only as citizens of the United States?
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When you merge societies, you create new synergies. The border between the United States and Canada is a border we need to erase.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,400.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:21 PM