George Will promotes the Doctrine of Letting Stuff Happen

George Will disapproves of the Obama and Bush Administration's efforts to stand government in the way of the natural progress of economic events. Presumably he would have let the financial system and auto industry collapse, and if a Great Depression was the result, then so be it. He is uncomfortable with a society that takes charge of events:

Even more than the New Deal and the Great Society, Obama's agenda expresses the mentality of a class that was nascent in the 1930s but burgeoned in the 1960s and 1970s. The spirit of that class is described in Saul Bellow's 1975 novel "Humboldt's Gift." In it Bellow wrote that the modern age began when a particular class of people decided, excitedly, that life had "lost the ability to arrange itself":

"It had to be arranged. Intellectuals took this as their job. . . . This arranging has been the one great gorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrous project. A man like Humboldt, inspired, shrewd, nutty, was brimming over with the discovery that the human enterprise, so grand and infinitely varied, had now to be managed by exceptional persons. He was an exceptional person, therefore he was an eligible candidate for power." So, shrewd and nutty people such as Rep. Barney Frank are brimful of excitement about arranging American life. What will stop them? The president accurately says Americans are "reluctant shareholders" of GM, AIG and Citigroup. But is he?

John Maynard Keynes was our age's great debunker of the doctrine of letting stuff happen. As the world hurtled toward Depression, he noted (I can't think of the source now) that orthodox economists would all agree that if someone somewhere were to make a large discovery of gold, the resulting increase in the money supply would solve the problem. And so they were willing to wait, impatiently, for such a discovery to occur. But Keynes pointed out that we can take control of events. Let's pretend that gold has been discovered and simply print the money that that new gold would have backed (we'll call this "devaluation"). More devastating to the orthodoxy was Keynes' observation (in his essay "Auri Sacra Fames" and elsewhere) that society had already gone far down the road of breaking the link between precious metals and money. Central banks no longer let the money supply fluctuate with short-term flows of gold, the public had long since learned to accept government's promises to pay gold as a substitute for gold itself. It was a small practical leap (but a great intellectual one) to take sovereignty over the money supply and by extension the macroeconomy.

But the idea that the government should step in and (to some extent) direct economic events has a much longer pedigree than this, in the U.S. going back at least as far as Alexander Hamilton and his National System (under which the government promoted domestic manufacturing by protecting it behind a wall of tariffs and investing in infrastructure). For that matter, what was Ferdinand and Isabella's sponsorship of Columbus' voyages or King Khufu's pyramids? If Will wants to take us back to some golden age where governments just stepped back and "let stuff happen," he's asking us to walk back through an awful lot of history.