Page 157 - The Drucker Lectures

138 [ The Drucker Lectures

government do?” is not easy, by the way. I came to this country
and this town in 1937 as a correspondent for a group of British
papers, and coming out of Europe it was an incredible revelation
to see practically every one of the New Deal programs work.
Some of them were perhaps not well conceived, but they worked.
And not one government program since 1950 has worked.
And not only in this country. The only exception is Japan,
and there it’s beginning not to work now. But otherwise, whether
you look at Britain or Germany or France, there isn’t a single
government program that has worked. They all have the same
results of costing a hell of a lot of money and usually creating a
beautiful neoclassical building and that’s it. There is not a person
in this room or in this country who believes that if Congress or
the president announces a new program, it will work. You’re all
total cynics, which is dangerous, by the way. All we say is, “well,
how much is it going to cost?” But nobody asks, “what is it going
to do?” because nobody believes in it anymore. And that is not
cynicism; that’s experience. Ask the question, simply: “What
can government do?” It’s a question that hasn’t been asked for
200 years. What is the competence of government? Not: what
are the good intentions of government?
Another thing you can see is that we’re moving into an economy
for which there was no precedent until the European Economic
Community triggered it. But whether you like it or not—and not
all of us like it—we have a North American economic commu-
nity. It’s almost irrelevant whether Congress passes the customs
union or not, because integration is 80 percent complete.
Fifty years hence, I think it’s predictable that historians will
say that what is happening in North America is more important
than what’s happened in Europe. If you had told anybody 10
years ago that a Mexican government would ask for a customs
union with the United States, everybody would have given you a
horse laugh. I don’t know how well you know Mexico, but Mexi-