Goodbye Howard (Again), Hello Keynes (Again)?

WELL may Jason Soon welcome the participation of a trio of talented libertarians in Kevin Rudd's 2020 ego-fest. As Andrew Bolt indicates today, they'll have their work cut out balancing a veritable bedlam of throwbacks - including advocate of art-state Stalinism and liquidating conservatives, Robert Manne, global warming cult commander Tim Flannery, and failed socialist ex-Premier of Victoria, Joan Kirner. The purpose of the Summit, needless to say, is not to formulate ideas for national governance that will be in any real sense new. No, its actual role will be to formalise the Prime Minister's recantation of his often telegraphed pre-election undertaking to be just like John Howard. It's the culture war version of the old post-election trick of affecting to be shocked - shocked - to discover the true state of the budget. Mr Rudd will collectivise the stagecraft and pronounce, in a hundred different ways, that he can no longer afford to be like his predecessor.

In America, a bigger ideological shift is also potentially in the offing, though for very different reasons. While macroeconomic affairs have certainly been in the news, the accompanying macro-polemics about what the ongoing mortgage and credit crisis will mean for the Role of Government is being largely ignored - even by the two groups which customarily have so much passion invested in that venerable debate: libertarians and unreconstructed interventionists. As David Wessel, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explains: "The past 10 days will be remembered as the time the US government discarded a half-century of rules to save American financial capitalism from collapse." The government's involvement in managing the crisis is not yet at "FDR levels," he argues, but Daniel Gross in Time sounds triumphant: "... the Bush administration is going back to the future, using New Deal-era agencies as the cornerstone of its response." That's big news.