And it's also true that I am no kind of populist. My big concern at the moment is precisely that the radical rise in American economic inequality since 1980 - and the serious slowdown of midde-class income growth that has set in since 2000 - will tempt America to adopt quack economic ideas that will impoverish this country and do radical damage to the world economy.
One of the big concerns in Comeback is the relative economic decline of Europe and the possibility of similar decline in the US. Together, the major democratic nations (the US and Canada, western Europe, Japan, Australia, and the Asian allies) produced 50% of world economic output in 1985. As things are going, that group of nations - now reinforced by central Europe, South Korea, Taiwan, and Mexico) will produce only 33% of world output in 2025. That's a huge negative swing in world economic power!
If it is correct that China's economy is about half the size of the US economy today, and if it is true that China is growing at the 9% claimed by the Chinese authorities, a simple calculation can plot the convergence of the US and China. If the US grows at its current 3%, China will not catch up in this century. But if the US slows to the 2% of the 1970s - or the 1% of western Europe in the 1990s - then American hegemony will end in the lifetimes of most readers of this website.
Sustaining 3% economic growth is thus a vital national security - as well as economic - concern. My prescriptions for how to maintain the desired 3% are relentlessly orthodox: free trade, low taxes on saving and investment, lawsuit reform, transparent capital markets, etc. etc. etc.
Where I have become heterodox is that it is glaringly apparent to me that the things that need to be done to sustain America's economic greatness are not going to win many votes in middle-class America. If conservatives are to protect the US economy against the John Edwardses of this world, they have to take seriously the economic discontents of a middle that (wrongly) blames globalization for its economic woes.
My prescription for that - for raising middle-class incomes - involves universal (private-sector) health insurance, curtailment of unskilled immigration, greater subsidies to lower-middle-income saving, and tax reforms aimed at lightening the burden of the payroll tax rather than the income tax - and a bunch of other ideas that will alas cause my old colleagues at the Wall Street Journal editorial page to sputter and cough.
You can call that technocracy if you want. I call it inoculation against the distempers of the times.
http://frum.nationalreview.com/