Wow Fareed Zakaria really???
"The Post American World" by Fareed Zakaria is Obama's Favorite Book!
I'm guessing you've never read said book.
You, on the other hand, probably think it is insightful. What I do not understand is why he looks at the European system, which had to rebuild from scratch post WWII, and thinks that we should try to copy it. Does it really make sense to think that the government, which lives off of the very infrastructure he thinks we need to abandon, is actually going to work to eliminate itself.
Taxes should be used only for one thing, as revenue for the government. We have used them in this country to make social policy for decades. The problems that Zakaria looks to the government to solve were created, and are sustained, by the government. Why do you think BP had no qualms about handing $20 billion to the government? Doing so made the government a partner with them in limited the damages they have to pay, and you supported it.
I do agree with him about one thing, America needs to lead. We need to stop looking at the rest of the world and trying to do things the same way they do, we need to find out what works and do it. The government cannot do that for one simple reason, the government cannot accept failure. Look at how hard it is to stop doing something everyone things should stop, like building a completely useless spare engine for the new JSF. The pentagon has cancelled it every single year, Bush and Obama both left it out of their budgets, yet it still gets funding because it keeps a few hundred people employed in a key congressional district.
The government never backs down when they get it wrong, they just keep spending money because it is the way they do things, and not spending money makes them the enemies of someone whose job is going to die because that particular plant is going to close. No congressman is ever going to go back to his district and tell them that he voted to close a plant because it was the right thing to do. Having the government "invest" in green energy is just going to have us supporting a plant that makes solar panels while someone in Somalia builds fusion bottles than can be put into garages because they do not have to deal with the paperwork and regulations that stifle innovation.
The problem with this country is not that private enterprise is not ready, willing, and able to innovate, the problem is that the government will not let them.
I think Zakaria makes an argument people need to near in a concise and articulate manner, but it's nothing groundbreaking.
Your argument rests on an invalid premise. There isn't a conflict between what other nations do and what works. Some things other nations do work, some things they do don't work.
Also, you should really stop attributing beliefs to other people (re: Gulf oil spill, for example).