Opportunity Knocks

After 9/11, my opinion of Thomas Friedman was pretty low.  His support for the Iraq invasion and the even dumber remarks he initially made about Afghanistan turned me off.  But his observations about America's relative position in the world have been insightful and his latest opinion piece, Time to Reboot America, is well worth reading.I'm pessimistic about America's economic future because, although as Friedman rightly point out, we have many advantages, we also seem so committed to a series of structural problems that I'm doubtful that we'll achieve our potential. 

Compared with other countries, we overspend with little effect on health care, which cripples the competitiveness of some of our large, unionized industries. We allow lawyers to run wild, with little net benefit to the population. We keep energy taxes low, creating a huge national security problem, while we spend billions on the almost immaterial threat from Islamic terrorists. We allow our education system to be run by unions that insist that no teacher can ever be paid according to ability, only seniority and farcical "education" credits.

We've lost the momentum and it won't be easy to regain it. I wonder where we'd be today if in 2000, we'd elected someone like Obama instead of George W. Bush. It's asking a lot to thrust Obama into the current mess and expect him to fix it, but OK, we're asking.