'Disruption is never restful'

George Will greets the impending battle between Walmart and Amazon to become what the New York Times calls "the predominant seller of pretty much everything you buy" with something like glee. For him, it'll be the climax of a dramatic cycle of creative destruction, the sort of thing that made America great. If you don't like the idea, Will likely sees you as part of the problem with America, just like most of the politicians, including the President. None of you get what's cool about this, but once again Will tries to explain it to us:

In the accelerated churning of today’s capitalism, changing tastes and expanding choices destroy some jobs and create others, with net gains in price and quality. But disruption is never restful, and the United States now faces a decision unique in its history: Is it tired — tired of the turmoil of creative destruction? If so, it had better be ready to do without creativity.

Notice how the "net gains" are taken for granted as a historical constant. Notice, too, that they are net gains by a consumerist standard, presuming that by "gains in price" Will means lower prices. And notice, while you're at it, the columnist's fatalistic assumption that all creativity is destructive, that steps can't be taken by a protectionist President or anyone else to preserve jobs without utterly extinguishing creativity. For Will, creativity is inherently competitive, and to question the pervasiveness and mercilessness of competition it to lobotomize the nation. "Americans just now are being plied with promises that the political class can, and is eager to, protect them from the need to make strenuous exertions to provide for themselves in an increasingly competitive world," he writes. To question the necessity of strenuous exertions dictated by economic competition is to question the natural -- that is, the spontaneous order, the "fecundity" of which is undermined by politicians or professors pretending to be "clever and farsighted enough to forecast the outcomes of complex systems." High up on his Hayekian hobby horse, Will writes that "The interacting processes that propel the world produce outcomes that no one intends." In effect, Will is telling us not to hold creatively destructive entrepreneurs, or competitors whose "creativity" consists entirely of cost-cutting, personally responsible for the human consequences of "disruption." All that activity is simply nature at work, while any attempt to regulate that activity for humane or patriotic purposes is just plain destructive -- and boring.

Recalling the poet Philip Larkin's line, "Most things are never meant," Will asks, "Who really wants to live in a society where outcomes are 'meant,' meaning planned and unsurprising?" He has a psychopath's enjoyment of "surprise," apparently, responding to the spectacle of creative destruction like lower-order moviegoers thrilling to Transformers wrecking cities. The desire for stability or security is not as contemptible as Will makes it out to be, so long as it isn't constrained by short-term thinking. Nor should either stability or security be confused with stasis, as Will would have us do. It would be wrong for politicians to tell us that we'll never need to make "strenuous exertions," but should we need to exert ourselves so, it should be for some better reason than that millions of people want to make more money. There is no law that I know of that says we have to adapt or die because The Market says so, yet Will regards the audacity of people saying no to The Market as akin to Stalin launching a Five-Year Plan, even though Stalinism itself could be described as a form of creative destruction. Whatever Friedrich Hayek actually thought, George Will is less interested in preventing a planned economy than in preempting protests against the economy. Like God, The Market for Will cannot be wrong, and it is heresy in his eyes for anyone to say otherwise. An aging prophet of The Market, Will stands ready to damn America for failing to heed his god.