Morning Must-Read: Noah Smith: Japan’s Abe Is the World’s Best Leader

Noah Smith: Japan’s Abe Is the World’s Best Leader: “I was a Shinzo Abe skeptic…

…When Abe swept back into power in 2012, I thought he was just going to try to talk down the yen and give a little boost to stocks, increasing his public support just long enough to ram through a revision of Japan’s pacifist constitution. I thought he was going to ignore Japan’s moribund economy and long-festering social problems in order to throw red meat to his right-wing backers. Boy, was I wrong. I was wrong, wrong, wrong…. Shinzo Abe is the most effective national leader in the world right now… the biggest monetarist push in world history. He went the opposite direction of Europe, and–unlike the U.S.–he gave every indication that the shift toward [expansionary] monetarism was permanent. The result: Japan has escaped deflation. The stock market is up, growth is way up and even wages are finally starting to rise…. Unlike everyone else… Abe listened to Milton Friedman, and the results are looking good. As the Fed contemplates not whether to taper its quantitative easing but how fast, it might want to look at what’s happening in Japan. But monetary policy was just the beginning… the role of women… moving to cut Japan’s corporate tax rate… deregulation efforts… suggested bringing in 200,000 immigrants a year…. He has turned his nationalism into something that looks like liberal internationalism, standing up for the various small Asian countries… championing the rule of law and the freedom of the seas…. But where Abe really shines is in comparison with previous Japanese leaders… The rest of the world should be paying attention.