2022 was a year full of surprises. Important things didnƵt work out as many people had expected on just about every point on the political spectrum.
The prime example: Ukraine. When Vladimir PutinƵs Russian troops invaded on Feb. 24, it looked like an independent Ukraine was toast. Military experts on cable channels said Russia had overwhelming superiority. It would take Kyiv and occupy the whole country.
The Biden administration evidently shared this view, evacuating the U.S. Embassy and offering a plane to rescue the president (and former comedian) Volodymyr Zelensky, who at this point uttered the immortal words, ƵI need ammunition, not a ride.Ƶ
The Biden administration, to its credit, adjusted to the unexpected reality and provided Ukraine with vital military and economic aid. This week, Zelensky visited Washington voluntarily, not as an exile. And it is Putin who is describing his sideƵs position in Ukraine as Ƶextremely difficult.Ƶ
The lesson is that morale can trump material. People will prove braver and more resourceful when protecting their freedom and their nationƵs independence than firepower statistics suggest.
That is another way of saying that nationalism Ƶ regarded by many in the press and academia as a form of fascism Ƶ can be a positive force for human freedom. This is true even in a place that has been a separate nation, except for a few months in post-World War I chaos, for only a single generation.
A second surprise of 2022 has been the decline of China. It wasnƵt so long ago that sophisticated soothsayers predicted its economy would soon be larger than AmericaƵs and that its centralized and admittedly authoritarian experts were showing the way to plan for the future.
So much for that. The Chinese Communist PartyƵs rigid lockdown to suppress COVID-19 has done more economic damage than just about anyone deemed possible. This was not the regimeƵs first unexpected infliction of self-harm. That would be its 1970s one-child policy, which has left China now with a population that has become elderly before it got rich. Maybe this shouldnƵt have been unexpected.
And maybe it shouldnƵt have been unexpected that even ChinaƵs stringent lockdowns couldnƵt prevent the spread of a virus transmissible by asymptomatic persons and that, with appropriate vaccines, is seldom fatal except among elderly people with serious risk factors. Unfortunately, the supposedly efficient Chinese used their own inferior vaccine rather than one developed under the Trump administrationƵs Operation Warp Speed.
It shouldnƵt have been unexpected that ChinaƵs lockdowns wreaked enormous economic damage. Here in the U.S., similarly, the harshest lockdowns and masking requirements inflicted self-harm on liberal-run institutions such as unionized public schools and central-city mass transit systems.
ChinaƵs economic crash has destroyed the long-held expectation that it would grow ever more prosperous and powerful, just as ChinaƵs truculent behavior destroyed the optimistic expectation that its international trade ties would make it a responsible, rules-bound and democratic nation.
The good news about these failed expectations is that RussiaƵs unexpected failure to conquer Ukraine may have made ChinaƵs leaders more cautious about attacking Taiwan.
A third surprise this year is that massive transfers of trillions of dollars, initiated by the Trump administration and vastly increased by Biden Democrats, have not restored the low-inflation economy with growth tilted toward the low-skill and low-income that was chugging along nicely in the Trump years up until February 2020.
The theory behind these enormous infusions is that when demand is down, if you throw enough money out of helicopters (Milton FriedmanƵs metaphor), growth will result. ThatƵs how it worked in the Detroit of my childhood years: you gave consumers more money through subsidies or tax cuts, demand for cars rose, and GM, Ford and Chrysler recalled all those workers theyƵd laid off a few months before. Everything was back in place.
But todayƵs economy is more complicated than the Detroit midcentury model suggests. Ƶ maverick economist Arnold Kling argues, the economy is the sum of multiple patterns of sustainable specialization and trade. COVID-19 restrictions disrupted hundreds of thousands of these patterns, and reconstructing them Ƶ or constructing new ones Ƶ takes time and imaginative effort by many firms and individuals.
So the trillions of dollars injected into the economy have left many people out of jobs, even while employers vainly seek employees Ƶ the so-called Great Resignation. These trillions also sparked skyrocketing inflation, which Democrats and the Federal Reserve insisted was transitory but now looks to be out of control.
