Thursday, November 13, 2008

Developing the Sensible Party's founding principles

HBS's Michael Porter had an excellent piece in BusinessWeek a couple of weeks ago discussing the need for strategic planning to guide our government's economic decision making. Yes. A thousand times yes.

Instead of taking a position on a laundry list of issues, the Sensible Party needs to take a holistic, strategic view as a starting point. What should our economic strategy be? And besides economic issues, what else is important to us?

4 comments:

VooDoo said...

Fix PK-12 education
Fix national infrastructure, including Water/Civil Works prioritization like BRAC
Free trade
Sustainability/"Green"

GammaBoy said...

Really good article, although the end bit dreaming of a post-partisan focus on competitiveness seems overly optimistic.

There are two major structural advantages that he failed to mention, and both are probably more fundamentally important to our past economic success than anything he listed.

One, clear and unambiguous property rights. Two, rule of law. Lots of economic basket cases out there can be traced back to one of the absence of these traits.

When I freak out about the bailout, part of the reason is that I get a little panicky when I see the rule of men replace the rule of law.

Restless Native said...

I love me some VooDoo. I might add immigration to the list, as it has been the bedrock of our growth in every sense, as either a symptom or a cause. Cheap labor, anyone?

Anonymous said...

Education - decentralize, allowing local government more control and allow for parental choice through vouchers

Environment - put a price on pollution - cap&trade on all unwanted pollution allows clean tech a margin to compete

Immigration - set a % of population that is allowed for immigration each year - recruit the best and brightest worldwide, they'll come here and create businesses and jobs

Free Trade

Economic Freedom - adopt an Economic Bill of Rights to remove all the government intervention in the free market that exists today (not all regulation, but the absurdities like sugar subsidies and trucking permits that either limit competition or give taxpayer money away to those with leverage)

The overall vision is that America's economy becomes one of innovation and creation rather than rote-type manufacturing. Lets gather the best minds and educate Americans rather than trying to hold onto crappy jobs. Allow those minds a free market to create businesses.