A few days ago I wrote about a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by former Microsoft COO Bob Herbold, who had recently returned from a visit to China. Herbold was enthused by the strides that country is making toward building a modern infrastructure and investing in technology development and scientific research. The lesson he took away from China’s progress is that the US needs to deal with “the burden of entitlements”—no surprise, coming from the Journal’s editorial pages—and elect a unified government capable of emulating China’s five-year plans. He expressed admiration for China’s own government, saying that “[t]he autocratic Chinese leadership gets things done fast (currently the autocrats seem to be highly effective).”

Herbold is far from the only person who dreams of a unity government and has access to opinion pages. New York Times doofus Tom Friedman reliably calls for a gridlock-shattering third party representing the massive Tom Friedman segment of the electorate, although he stops short of recommending dictatorial powers for Michael Bloomberg or whichever “centrist” plutocrat/daddy figure he thinks can crack the whip over a fractious Congress and impose the grownup agenda favored by wealthy columnists across the land. (Particularly entertaining was his insistence that Bloomberg couldn’t be influenced by money because he already has most of it.)
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