Greed Your Creed or Good for the Hood?

The debate between the left and the right is boiling down to the usual suspects: greed versus the common good. Does a person’s right to get rich take precedence over another person’s right to survive? That’s the question about rights that all debates between liberals and conservatives ultimately boil down to. It is the maple syrup that’s left from all the sap that comes oozing from the trunks of both conservative and liberal family trees.
Folks bent on becoming rich seldom notice or care about the poor or even the middle class. They are too busy buying companies and hedging their bets to bother with society’s losers. And the losers are society’s losers, not theirs. There is no ownership among the masters of the universe concerning the unintended consequences of their wealth. Their ownership is about stuff. They are not their brother’s keeper. No time for that until perhaps they have arrived in their own mind at the point of satiety when they can then join the noblesse oblige, if they so choose.
The rationale for laissez-faire greed has always been the trickle-down theory or the bubble up one as in “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Never mind that your rowboat leaks and his yacht’s wake could swamp you any second. In theory, both trickle-down and bubble-up are logical. The trouble is they don’t take into account the reality most folks face, especially when the economy goes south but even when it is booming, according to the usual tools of measurement like GDP. Trickle- down, in particular, reminds me of rain over a high desert: most of it never hits the ground. There is plenty of rain falling, but most of it evaporates. Therefore, trickles and bubbles end up being mere blind rationales for continued greed.
The liberals, on the other hand, are all about the common good, in theory. However, there seem to be as many rich folks among the liberals as among conservatives these days. These so called “limo- liberals” talk a good game about the common good but they benefit as much from their investments in good times as do the cutthroat Wall Street conservatives. Theirs is a consumer-oriented philosophy that sees an LED TV in every living room, the updated version of “a chicken in every pot.” Their measure of economic success is the employment rate and the differential between rich and poor, not GDP. In theory they look at how the middle class and the poor are faring and judge the economy on the basis of unemployment rate, size of the middle class, and rate of improvement in standard of living for the average American. Instead of trusting trickle-down or bubble-up, liberals try to assess the actual well-being of the average person and judge the economy accordingly.
What neither liberal nor conservative seems to get about our economy is that we no longer make things in America. Our economy is based on the service industry, particularly on financial services, not manufacturing. If we are to ever restore low unemployment rates in America, we need to retool our industry and redirect our financial institutions toward investment in domestic industry. In short, we need to become a producer of goods and not merely a consumer culture. We also need to replace corporate America as we now know it with real competition among smaller scale companies that actually improve energy efficiency, foster sustainable living, and promote health and well-being.
One way to accomplish this is to tie Wall Street bonuses to the lowering of the unemployment rate. That way, investors will be encouraged to invest in companies that need a domestic labor force, that actually make things and contribute to the growth of GDP.
Another is for the federal government to create incentives for industries that we actually need and to remove subsidies for those we don’t. A pure market economy is directed by appetite, not need. That kind of economy will always go to the candy or fast food drive-thru before it eats its vegetables. It is unhealthy for the country and for the individual citizen. We have heard the stories from GM about how they listened to consumers and decided to build more big pick-ups and SUVs because “that’s what the American consumer wanted.” That’s nonsense. The American consumer has little capacity for long-term thinking, as evidenced by the consumer credit debt it has amassed of late and the size of the houses it has purchased but could ill afford. The government has to set the country’s priorities the way it has done so in time of world war using the tool of incentives directed toward the common good, not common taste.
Finally, conservatives and liberals alike need to put aside their theories and measurements and face facts. Our country is going to die a slow death at best if we don’t stop bickering over philosophy and start getting very pragmatic about how to generate a renewed and vibrant economy. Going back to the same old ways will not work. Otherwise, the directed economy of China will blow past us like a NASCAR champion while we continue to lose speed around the world economic track in our gas-guzzling, cumbersome pick-up or SUV.