Politics & Power Quote by Jon Huntsman, Jr.

Huntsman’s line is a neat piece of center-right heresy dressed up as common sense. He takes a staple Republican critique - that government should keep its hands off “economic development” - and answers it with a jab that’s half policy argument, half status flex. The misfire (“Papa New Guinea,” not Papua New Guinea) almost underlines the point: he’s not trying to deliver a geography lesson. He’s trying to make laissez-faire absolutism sound unserious.

The intent is triangulation. Huntsman, a Republican with technocratic instincts and executive experience, is defending an approach many in his party quietly rely on (incentives, infrastructure, workforce training, trade promotion) but often hesitate to praise out loud. By saying every real country has a plan, he frames planning not as socialism but as basic state competence. The subtext: you can be pro-market and still believe the market needs a referee, a road system, and a strategy.

The Papua New Guinea comparison functions as rhetorical blunt force. It sets up a hierarchy: serious nations plan; only the out-of-the-loop don’t. That’s a risky move because it leans on a patronizing development-world stereotype. Yet politically it’s effective because it shifts the argument from ideology to modernity. He’s not asking Republicans to love government; he’s asking them not to confuse purity with sophistication. The context is a party wrestling with its own contradictions: denouncing “industrial policy” while chasing jobs with tax breaks and courting corporate relocations. Huntsman is naming the quiet part - and daring critics to admit they benefit from it.