Liberal Lion J.K. Galbraith Dead at 97

He was a government price controller, a Harvard professor, a public intellectual, a writer of best-sellers, and the face of liberal economics. He was John Kenneth Galbraith and we shall not see his like again.

In the 1950s he taught liberals how to sneer at the American middle class with his best-seller The Affluent Society. In The New Industrial State he taught how General Motors and corporations like it ran the world. In American Capitalism he advanced his ideas of the corporative state as the balance between “contervailing powers” of business, labor, and government.

If you read the appreciative obituary in the London Times you will learn that he was a genius who offered insights into the economy. If you read Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Daily Telegraph you will learn that

"He is one of those unfortunate people who lived long enough to see his ideas discredited," said Doug McWilliams of the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

In his heyday in the 1960s and 1970s he was the voice of enlightened liberalism. He was always ready with an acerbic sound bite to put down the conservative line, and liberals basked in his talent and his brilliance. His best-sellers flowed out, one after the other, confirming for liberals everything they knew, or would have known if they had thought about it.

On occasion Galbraith would debate with William F. Buckley, Jr. as Mr. Liberal against Mr. Conservative. They were well matched, each with an arrogant presence that satisfied their supporters and enraged the opposition.

Democrats sorely miss his presence on the team, as an all-rounder who could think, write, and perform on TV, and pitch their ideas like a pro.

It was doubtless his authority that encouraged Democrats to believe that Reaganomics would never work. But as the old corporative world of big business vs. big labor gave way to the global economy where rent-seeking corporations and labor unions had no place to hide, his ideas began to lose their lustre.

Despite the power of Galbraith’s prose the economy is not a simple narrative of business vs. labor with noble government in between. It is far bigger than that, and far more fascinating.

But it is a world in which liberals are much less important than they would like to be.