Pre-election pondering from awhile ago

October, 2008

To paraphrase President Bill Clinton’s keynote speech at the National Governors’ Association in Philadelphia this summer – we should face this election by seeing the community we have and envisioning the community we want – and vote accordingly.

In my lifetime, I have seen the attitudes of the American people calcify into a disregard and almost antipathy toward labor and working people in general. Wealth is lionized, and we are all challenged to strive toward accumulation of wealth, and if not actual accumulation we should at least appear to be wealthy. Popular culture, from the 1980’s serials like Dallas and Dynasty to the Rappers of the 1990’s and Hedge Fund managers of the 2000’s, has aroused in Americans an alternative value system that is no longer based on sacrifice and hard work. It’s not Capitalism that is dead – the Puritan Work Ethic is dead.

At the same time that this collective striving toward consumption and opulence was occurring, there was a concurrent decline in the real wages of working people. Faced with the pressure to “keep up” many of us lived far beyond our means. This is true of both working people and our policy makers and industry leaders. This election marks the point in time where we decide who we want to be as a society – if we want to continue being a people who live off of wealth and in the absence of wealth, credit, or do we want to be a people who live off of real work.

The conventional wisdom, the United States economic narrative, is that the responsible disposition of wealth will in turn benefit working people by encouraging entrepreneurship and reinvestment of wealth into longer term productive measures. What has been demonstrated, time and time again, is that the wealthy are no more responsible with their wealth than are the non-wealthy. What we have seen is an increase in the accumulation of wealth and income, and investments made not in production of tangible goods and services, but in “exotic financial derivatives that gamble on the anomalies of the global economy” (Judy Shelton, WSJ, 10/13/08). These investments may have had some relation to actual labor and production at some point in time, but they are ultimately several layers removed from the work of the American people.