Surrender Your Liberties! Get Cool Stuff!

As Jonah Goldberg and many others have noted, the Left has a real softspot for effective, efficient, productive dictatorships. The latest exhibit in the sad history of the liberal love affair with totalitarianism is Tom Friedman's column in today's New York Times.

Friedman waxes eloquent on all the fabulous booty China laid before the world during the Olympic Games and contrasts this sharply with the sad condition of...LaGuardia Airport, a facility that causes much suffering among the denizens of Manhattan. China, Friedman tells us,

"did not build the magnificent $43 billion infrastructure for these games, or put on the unparalleled opening and closing ceremonies, simply by the dumb luck of discovering oil. No, it was the culmination of seven years of national investment, planning, concentrated state power, national mobilization and hard work."

Really.

You can scour Friedman's analysis from stem to stern and find not one mentnion of political oppression, human rights abuses, forced abortion or any of the other myriad sins the Chinese regime commits daily against its own citizens and around the world in places like Sudan.

Yes, Mr. Friedman, you can get whopping GDP growth and Potempkin-village improvements in highways, maglev trains and public parks if the government directs all aspects of politcal, cultural, and economic life. Yes, if you want material well-being you can get it, fast, at least in the short term, by denying people the right to govern themselves, think for themselves, worship freely, and live in peace within the four walls of their own homes. A bit tougher to "concentrate state power" and engage in "national mobilization" when you have you a constitution, free elections, separation of powers, a free press, private property and religious freedom.

What with all those checks and balances progress is bound to be slow. You might even have to answer a few difficult questions about ways and means. Someone might say, "I don't want to eat grass for dinner so that you can build the Bird's Nest," and you wouldn't be able to settle the argument with a quick prison sentence or a bullet to the back of the head.