Timothy P. Carney‘s latest Washington Examiner article takes General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt to task for suggesting that Americans “ought to be cheerleaders for his multinational industrial conglomerate.”
Americans from Left to Right derided this notion. Liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, in his typical acerbic style, called Immelt “rich and clueless,” while conservative website Newsbusters called Immelt’s argument “stunning.” The reaction confirmed half of Immelt’s point: Americans don’t really do economic nationalism. We don’t see Boeing as the U.S. Olympic Jumbo Jet team or General Motors as carrying the stars and stripes into the world automaking championships.
Immelt has long lamented this stubborn individualism of the U.S. economy, compared with the more cooperative Asian and European economies. At last year’s annual conference of the Export-Import Bank of the United States — a federal agency that subsidizes U.S. exporters like GE and Boeing — Immelt had a rather dour description of the free market in the United States.: “For so long, we’ve said, ‘It just doesn’t matter. Let whatever happens happen.'”
“Germany is the model,” Immelt has said, because it has more “public will” and national “vision.” He explained: “The companies roam as a pack. They stick together. And the government supports the companies to be exporters.” He enviously described China’s “incredible unanimity of purpose from top to bottom.”
Again, Americans bristle at the suggestion that we should all march under the GE flag. But Immelt isn’t some lone wolf here: He’s basically articulating Obamanomics.
