WASHINGTON, April 3 (UPI) -- What do American TV, Lenin, this month's French elections, Margaret Thatcher and Kansas farmers all have in common? The answer lies in a 3-part series, running for six hours on American public television, an ambitious and highly serious attempt to comprehend the great battle of ideas between free markets and government controls that dominated the 20th century.
The title of the series comes from the first Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, who argued that the state did not need to own everything, only "The Commanding Heights" of the economy -- the banks, railroads, ports and power stations. The subsequent book of the same title by Daniel Yergin is the basis of the TV series that starts Wednesday evening in the United States. It will be broadcast soon in Britain and elsewhere, and should go a long way to explode that patronizing theory that American TV is all game shows, bikinis and Jerry Springer.
The series traces the way that free market economics seemed to be discredited by the mass unemployment and bankruptcies of the 1930s Great Depression, while the centralized and state-dominated economies of Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany appeared to booming. Then the adoption of central planning techniques by Britain and the United States to fight World War II seemed to vindicate the view that free markets did not work.
Then came the combined inflation and stagnant growth of the 1970s, the bold championing of the free market by economists such as Milton Friedman, and the crucial political victories of Thatcher in Britain in 1979, and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980. Taxes and public spending were cut, state-owned businesses privatized, entrepreneurs encouraged rather than hounded by tax authorities -- while the dark heart of central planning in Moscow was sinking into systemic collapse.
The twin themes of the Cold War and battle of free markets comes together in one extraordinary sequence from the 1980s, a videotape of Thatcher lecturing the leaders of Poland's Solidarity movement on what they should do when they eventually take over the reins of power. And they did. As Poland's Lech Walesa tells the camera "You don't say No to Mrs. Thatcher."
The results are well known. Britain bounced back from being the world's 6th-largest economy and dropping, to the 4th largest and still growing. With one mild recession in 1991 and another that seems to be ending, the United States has enjoyed two decades of extraordinary growth that has more than doubled the size of the economy. Put like that, in a way that grossly simplifies the thoughtful and challenging TV series that Yergin has put together, it sounds like a conservative morality tale.
To Yergin's credit, he tackles the flaw in this argument, which is that the very success of the Anglo-American economies in crafting a globalized free-market system could now be germinating the seeds of its own destruction, as more and more of the world's poor start complaining that this brave new system is not doing much good for them.
That brings us to the Kansas farmers and the French elections. The most egregious sin of today's free market leaders is their hypocrisy in refusing the practice what they preach, be it President George Bush's flouting of free trade rules to impose 30 percent tariffs on imported steel, or the European Union's appalling record of protectionism on food. The power of the protectionists can derail even the highest national priorities, like Bush's war on terrorism. The president has ducked a fight with the protectionist Congressmen from America's textile states rather than open U.S. markets to Pakistan's textile exports -- which may be the key to the survival of President Pervez Musharraf's government.
The way to end global poverty is to open the markets of the rich world to the producers from the poor. Europe, the United States and Japan are currently spending more than $200 billion a year in subsidizing their farmers and protecting their markets from the food exports of the poor. The rich world's farm subsidy system is as sick as it is foolish, when the Canadian government forks out $2.50 in subsidies for every dollar of profit Ontario farmers earn, or $4 of subsidies in Quebec for every dollar in farm profits.
And yet Bush supports a farm bill that will increase the subsidies to be paid. And France's President Jacques Chirac, facing re-election this month and desperate for farm votes, personally vetoed the only serious attempt the EU has made to reform its appalling Common Agricultural Policy (which ought to stand for Crush Agriculture's Poor).
So if you tune in to "The Commanding Heights," one of the most serious and impressive efforts American TV has made to comprehend its own times, remember the despicable depths of hypocrisy to which even the most defenders of free trade and free markets can sink.
(Walker's World -- an in-depth look at the people and events shaping global geopolitics -- is published every Sunday and Wednesday.)
