Brooks argues today for Free-Market Socialism. (For those who notice it sounds like a subject for the School of Comparative Irrelevance, note that it would fit nicely in the Oxymoronics Dept., not the Adynata.)

In it Brooks argues,

If President Obama is really serious about restoring American economic dynamism, he needs an aggressive two-pronged approach: More economic freedom combined with more social structure; more competition combined with more support.

As a survey of nearly 10,000 Harvard Business School grads by Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin makes clear, to get companies to locate their plants in the U.S., Obama is going to have to simplify the tax code, cut corporate rates, streamline regulations, make immigration policy more flexible and balance the budget over the long term.

To ensure there’s skilled labor for those plants, Obama would have to champion different policies: successful training programs like Job Corps, better coordination between colleges and employers, better treatment for superstar teachers, more child care options and better early childhood education.

This agenda is libertarian in the capitalist sector and activist in the human capital sector. Don’t triangulate meekly toward the center; select bold policies from both ends.

The “activist” side of those policies would hamper the effectiveness of the libertarian side; more so if one expects such ideas to do as they always do, trespass individual liberties further and further out of misguided and unimaginative belief that doing so is the only way to “help.” Nevertheless, I could see where such policies would help in the short run simply because they would be marginal improvements in this country’s flagging economic liberty.

Brooks’ title is intended to capture attention, and it does. The notion of “Free-Market Socialism” is a wrong-headed concession to the Left’s superstition that advocacy of free markets is necessarily in opposition to advocacy for a better life for the poor. Quite the opposite is true.

Those like me who advocate for free markets and individual liberty do so because we see its history of making society better for all, especially including the poor, and we see this great history standing in stark contrast with the results all the other ideas of how to run society. Free people are free to address problems as they arise in society, and they do so much faster, more thoroughly, and more imaginatively than anything conceived in the slow-grinding clockwork mesh of government.

It’s not that we need free markets to bring in capital and industry and socialism to provide them with better educated workers shorn of parenting duties during working hours. We need freedom, period. Free-thinking, liberty-minded, compassionate and passionate individuals (America’s ultimate resource) have thought up myriad ways to address job training, education reform, rewarding excellence in the classroom, as well as the many other areas not including above. But they can’t act where government and the unimaginative power brokers road-block them.