The Road We Have Traveled
As I sit here this day after Christmas in the lull between Christmas Day excesses and New Years Eve excesses, I ponder where we have been and what we have learned. For the most part I fear we have learned nothing. Gas prices have gone down and so the focus is completely off alternate energy and the gas hogs are motoring everywhere. My conservative friends think if we just cut the waste in government and reduce spending we can go back to our old ways. The problem in Wall Street much like our perceived problem at Abu Ghraib, wants to be defined as a few bad, in this case greedy, apples. But the reality is that we facilitated that greed. I don’t think anyone is seeing the pending disaster or that the cause of it is our wish for a free ride.
Our free ride goes something like this: The economy will always grow if we just lower taxes, keep government interference in the market place a minimum, and then let the market place work its magic. We don’t have to plan our future because where there is a need, the market place will swoop in and fulfill it in the most cost effective way possible. As business thrives, our government coffers will fill and there will be money for things like roads, bridges, etc. And oh by the way, did I forget that we should never let government do anything because they do it badly, and that we should let private enterprise service our every need. Worked well so far hasn’t it? As James Galbraith in his book, “The Predator State”, points out, this just let the jackals of free enterprise do things that government is suppose to do, do it poorly, and make outrageous amounts of money doing it. In effect transfer public money to private hands.
Tom Friedman in a recent column noted the same problem (“Time to Reboot America”) when he noted that in Hong Kong he had clear reception on his cell phone, took a high speed train with continuous connectivity on his lap top to the airport, and then as he said, “Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.” The rest of the world is developing modern infrastructure and facilities and we continue to fall behind because we don’t believe we have to invest in our future. That investment is called taxes. We are still in the mode of all taxes are bad and they hurt business. Well you get what you pay for and since we have been on a personal buying jag and not investing in our country, the rubble is now for everyone to see if they are willing to look. Problem is most aren’t willing to look.
The other extension to this free ride theory is that we are all NOT in this together. Poor people are living out their just deserts. They deserve their station in life because they are lazy and lack self-discipline. There is always an element of blame in this view. Taxes that support services for these people do nothing but enable this behavior. It is a very self-serving view of why I have mine and you don’t deserve any of it. Sure there are lazy and worthless people, but once they were just little kids who may not have had the advantages the rest of us did. And more important to dashing this blame idea is that unless we all prosper, we will all decline. As our middle class has shrunk and wealth has become concentrated in the upper echelons of our society, our economy and our prospects for the future have declined.
Think about this: In the next few decades we will see the Chinese go to the Moon and establish a permanent base there. We were there 40 years ago and then lost our way. After 2010 we will have no way to get to our only achievement in man space flight, the Space Station, except hooking a ride on a Russian Rocket. What the hell were we thinking? While we got lost in consumerism, others have raced past us.
What really went wrong was the idea that wealth was an end in itself and that people who had it were to be admired. Wealth became a status symbol, a proof of accomplishment. The financial services industry grew by leaps and bounds (making money out of money) while the real economy of making things withered. People made obscene amounts of money and tricked themselves into believing they deserved it while others wanted. The sense of entitlement knew no bounds. If we are going to prosper in the future, we have to shun this kind of thinking. I am not talking about being rewarded for hard work and innovation; I am talking about making obscene amounts of money that you could not spend in a lifetime.
In summary, we can’t hope things will get better and then go back to our old ways. As Tom Friedman put it, we need to “reboot” and rebuild. We need a focus that says we have a national purpose and it is more than the accumulation of wealth. It is to build a strong and vibrant nation for all our children. This will only happen when we recognize, there is no free ride and we all have to pitch in. The start would be to recognize that gasoline should never again be below $4/gallon. But we aren’t there yet because you can almost hear the gasps as I suggest putting a $2/gallon tax on gasoline. What? And give up my cherished gas guzzling hog and my freedom to pollute the earth with it? No we are not there yet.