Mark Carney’s Mentor

Justin Trudeau, an open admirer of China’s “basic dictatorship,” has now given way to Mark Carney. The new prime minister’s mentor will be of interest on both sides of the border. 

Mark Carney earned a scholarship to Harvard, where he studied economics under John Kenneth Galbraith. Born in Ontario in 1908, Galbraith moved to the United States in the 1930s, earned a PhD in economics at UC Berkeley, and during WWII President Roosevelt tapped him to lead the Office of Price Administration. In 1949 the Canadian transplant became a professor at Harvard.

“When I was a college student, I took a course from John Kenneth Galbraith,” writes economist Thomas Sowell. On the first day of class, students gave the professor a standing ovation, but “Galbraith never got beyond the glittering generalities that marked his first lecture. After a while, the students got tired of not getting any real substance.”

Galbraith packed those “glittering generalities” into a series of books such as American Capitalism, The Affluent Society and The Age of Uncertainty, duly adapted as a series on PBS in 1977.

In 1984, Galbraith wrote, “It is evident that the Soviet economy has made great material progress in recent years,” partly because the USSR “makes full use of its manpower.” That left economists and historians rather puzzled.

Galbraith lived through the Stalin Era but seems to have missed the Ukrainian famine, the purges, and the millions of victims, duly charted by Robert Conquest in The Great Terror. As F.A. Hayek noted in The Road to Serfdom, the command economy runs up against the knowledge problem, and under socialism, the worst get on top. Stalin was the best evidence of those realities.

During the 1930s, squads of Western dignitaries and intellectuals came to the USSR to witness the first socialist state. Moscow correspondents ran contests to see who could produce the most striking example of credulity. Malcolm Muggeridge persuaded Lord Marley that long lines at food shops were permitted by the authorities “because it provided a means of inducing the workers to rest when otherwise their zeal for completing the five-year plan in record time was such that they would keep at it all the time.”

Galbraith repeated the performance with China’s Communist regime. During the murderous Cultural Revolution, his harshest criticism was that the Chinese smoked too many cigarettes.

“Millions of people beaten, tortured, and humiliated, the remains of a millennial civilization wantonly smashed,” noted Theodore Dalrymple, “and Galbraith bravely takes up the antismoking cause!” For economist William Anderson, that provides a window on the real Galbraith, who celebrated power over freedom.

“It did not matter how many people Mao killed as long as the Chinese believed that Galbraith was a Great Thinker.” To the very end, Anderson argues, “Galbraith was a socialist impersonating an economist.” In a similar style, Canadian politicians are essentially socialists impersonating New Democrats, “progressive” Conservatives, and Liberals. They complain of American influence, but things sometimes work the other way. 

Thomas Sowell authored influential books such as Basic Economics, A Conflict of Visions, and Affirmative Action Around the World. None was ever adapted for television by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

American liberals admire Canada’s multicultural policies, DEI directives, government monopoly health care, and so forth. In light of these dynamics, it was foolish of Trump to suggest that Canada become the 51st state. 

Galbraith’s influence remains evident, but Prime Minister Carney hasn’t made it clear where he stands on other issues. Does he agree with David Frum that Pierre Trudeau was a “bad man and a disastrous prime minister?”

Does Carney share Justin Trudeau’s admiration for China’s basic dictatorship? Has the People’s Republic of China ever done anything with which Mark Carney disagreed? 

During the COVID pandemic, the Trudeau government froze the bank accounts of protesting truckers. Does Mark Carney approve of that action? Did the globalist Klaus Schwab ever say or do anything with which Mark Carney disagreed? What is Carney’s response to surging anti-Semitism across Canada?

And so on. As Trump says, we’ll have to wait and see what happens.