Be Careful What You Wish For

One of the big things that happened while I was recovering from covid a few weeks ago was that the economic disaster in Sri Lanka led to mass protests and the resignation of the country’s president.

It took me a while to bounce back, but you didn’t think I was going to let that go without comment, did you? It is such a target rich environment, a confluence of multiple bad ideas. I took all of it on in an article that recently posted at Discourse.

The conservative response to Sri Lanka was to blame it on disastrous utopian environmentalism, and that part of the story is definitely true.

The immediate trigger for the popular uprising against [president Gotabaya] Rajapaksa was the collapse of Sri Lanka’s agricultural economy after his government imposed a ban on chemical fertilizers and launched a vast and sudden national experiment in organic farming….

Prior to this disaster, Sri Lanka’s agricultural success was a tribute to the “Green Revolution” of the 20th century that introduced modern fertilizers and pesticides to increase yields and make it possible for poor but populous nations to feed themselves. All of that was swept away in a single executive decree, and the price—which Sri Lankans have not finished paying—is mass poverty and starvation. 

But the fact that this system was imposed by executive decree points to the other part of the problem. Sri Lanka’s politics have long been dominated by the Rajapaksa family, and under Gotabaya Rajapaksa, their rule become increasingly authoritarian, tinged with elements of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. The Rajapaksas engaged in a vast spending spree of building projects to produce a Potemkin “super-growth,” financed in part by borrowing from China—because hey, what could go wrong?

The result is a crisis that left Sri Lanka without the foreign currency reserves necessary to buy chemical fertilizers, so the Rajapaksas tried to make a virtue of necessity by billing bankruptcy as a bold “green” initiative.

This dimension to the crisis adds another timely warning.

Yes, one of the lessons of Sri Lanka is a warning against the left and its fantasies that it can mandate the complete and sudden restructuring of the economy, particularly for environmentalist goals, without disastrous costs. But the other lesson is about the lure of a strongman who will be able to knock down all political restraints and “get things done,” because unrestrained power to do good also means the unrestrained power to do harm. Combining these two—conservative populist authoritarianism and left-wing economics—is the worst of both worlds.

Read the whole thing.

There are a lot of Americans longing for precisely such a combination right now. I begin the piece with a particularly embarrassing example from New York Times columnist David Brooks, who keeps pining for a leader like Teddy Roosevelt and then recoiling in horror when he actually looks like Donald Trump.

Those looking for a combination of conservative cultural populism and free-spending Big Government economics should be careful what they wish for, because they just got a warning about the results.