RALEIGH — Given recent temperatures, this might not be the best time to think about going barefoot, but I finally got around to reading Chris McDougall’s Born to Run nearly a year after a friend gave me his copy. The book has developed a cult-like following among runners and serves as a great advertisement for Vibram FiveFingers shoes. It has a number of memorable portraits of memorable people, but the religious conversion in the book is in its endorsement of barefoot running about midway through.
McDougall cites research and stories from coaches, doctors, patients, and professional runners to make the case that modern running shoes, engineered to correct foot problems and protect against the force of landing, are to blame for many running injuries. The human foot is designed for walking and running. It naturally moves to absorb impact through pronation. Running shoes are designed to block that movement.
“But once you block a natural movement,” Dr. [Gerard] Hartman said, “you adversely affect the others. We’ve done studies, and only two to three percent of the population has real biomechanical problems. … Every time we put someone in a corrective device, we’re creating new problems by treating ones that don’t exist.”
Runner’s World magazine admitted it had been giving bad advice with the best of intentions for years: “Recent research has shown stability shoes are unlikely to relieve plantar fasciitis and may even exacerbate the symptoms.”
In other areas, the overconfidence McDougall chronicles is called hubris. Russ Roberts, who wrote what is assuredly the most entertaining economics rap song ever, “Fear the Boom and Bust,” uses a Friedrich Hayek quote to burst such pretensions: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
Government officials have been like the Nike engineers. Trying to cushion the blow of an economic downturn with bailouts has left markets pushing harder for solid ground, and instead of relieving the economic pain, it has left the economy flatfooted and potentially set it up for worse problems.
On the state level, the federal bailout contributed $1.6 billion to North Carolina’s spending overhang. Medicaid alone has $1 billion in spending through June 30 that the state cannot afford after July 1. Unfortunately, the maintenance-of-effort requirements (i.e., handcuffs) attached to this money prevented the state from adjusting policy for less revenue.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act prohibits the state from reducing Medicaid eligibility and so leaves the state with even less room to fix its policy. As a result, the health care bill leaves North Carolina and other states with the choice of paying for Medicaid or paying for the rest of government.
The good news is that the current crisis means the budget has hit solid ground. With the bailout over, federal cushioning is gone. The state budget is unlikely to be in tighter straits than it will be this coming year as legislators try to squeeze what official estimates see as $21.9 billion in potential spending into $18.2 billion in expected revenue. We can call this barefoot budgeting. But what comes next?
There was once a belief “that four years of podiatric training could trump two million years of natural selection,” McDougall wrote. But there remains a corresponding belief that a small group of government decision makers can trump 9.5 million North Carolinians in deciding what is best.
Instead, government should seek the best ways to accomplish its core tasks. More times than has been acknowledged, this will mean getting out of the way so individuals, parents, philanthropists, and entrepreneurs can meet the needs of themselves, their families, their neighbors, and their customers.
Just as the 26 bones, 30 joints, and 20 muscles in the human foot adapt to the ground better and become stronger when not constrained by overengineered shoes, the millions of people and organizations in society are better able to adapt to the changing economic terrain without burdensome laws and regulations.
I look forward to barefoot day at the General Assembly next year.
Joseph Coletti is director of health and fiscal policy studies at the John Locke Foundation.