There is one word that George Will does not use, arrogance, in his blather post, probably because he doesn’t want to remind people of his general demeanor. He recounts the failure that was the Ford Edsel, with smugness and sarcasm dripping from each paragraph. Then there is this:
In 1958, with the Edsel already turned to ashes, John Kenneth Galbraith, with bad timing comparable to the launch of the Edsel, published “The Affluent Society.” It asserted that manufacturers, wielding all-powerful advertising, were emancipated from the law of supply and demand because advertisers could manufacture demand for whatever manufacturers wished to supply.
This theory buttressed the liberal project of expanding government in the name of protecting incompetent Americans from victimization and having government supplant the market as the allocator of wealth and opportunity. But all of Ford’s then-mighty marketing prowess could not keep the Edsel from being canceled in 1959. Brooks calculated that it would have been cheaper for Ford to skip the Edsel and give away 110,000 Mercurys.
Today, the United Auto Workers union and General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are trying to reverse the slide of the American automobile industry. Fifty Septembers ago, the country was atingle with anticipation of a new product that turned out to be a leading indicator of the slide. As Detroit toils to undo some contractual provisions that have burdened the companies with crippling health-care and pension costs, it should remember the real lesson of 1957: Americans are more discerning and less herdable than their cultured despisers suppose, so what matters most is simple — good products.
This column reads like a parable about the Iraq war. There was arrogance aplenty, as the neo-cons thought they could manufacture demand for Neo-Con brand of democracy, when what the people in Iraq wanted was clean water, security and a chance to live.