In some ways these two debates, though they seem very different, ought to be seen as two sides of the same coin. There’s a very big blind spot on the Left about government waste and inefficiency. There’s some degree to which government is doing the same for more, or doing less for the same. You can point to quasi-governmental things like spending on health care and education, where costs are spinning out of control. On the foreign policy side you can flag the wars in the Middle East, which have cost a lot more than we thought they should have. There’s an overall sense that in many different domains the government is working incredibly inefficiently and poorly. They’re currently building an access highway on one of the tunnels that feeds into the bridge, and it will take at least six years to complete.įrancis Fukuyama: And it will require countless environmental permits, litigation, and so on. It was built under FDR’s Administration in the 1930s in about three and a half years. Just outside my office is the Golden Gate Bridge. There are ways that the government is working far less well than it used to. I believe that is true, and that this problem has gotten dramatically worse. On the Right, the Tea Party argument has been about government corruption-not ethical violations necessarily, but inefficiency, that government can’t do anything right and wastes money. It’s a disturbing question which of these three is going to happen today, or if there’s a fourth way out. In the history of the modern world, inequality has only been ended through communist revolution, war or deflationary economic collapse. We’re now at an extreme comparable to 1913 or 1928 on a worldwide basis we’ve probably surpassed the 1913 highs and are closer to 1789 levels. Obviously if you extrapolate an exponential function it can go a lot further. It tends either to say it’s not true or that it doesn’t matter. The rapid rise in inequality has been an issue that the Right has not been willing to engage. Probably from 1973 to today, they have gone up faster than they did in the 19 th century. It’s evident that both forms of inequality have escalated at a very high rate. Peter Thiel: On the surface, one of the debates we have is that people on the Left, especially the Occupy Wall Street movement, focus on income and wealth inequality issues-the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. Francis Fukuyama: I’d like to begin by asking you about a point you made about there being certain liberal and conservative blind spots about America.
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