I didn’t watch the full speech. I heard a few excerpts, and was unimpressed. She really is a moron. Ok, she really isn’t a moron, but she’s a lightweight.
Apparently, she believes in Big Ideas. Her big idea is to make money from her celebrity, and to be frank, big money will solve all of her problems. She will be able to afford all the clothes she desires, day care for any kids she or her brood wish to bear, and as a wealthy woman, she will also be able to afford health care when she needs it. But as far a problem solving, she hasn’t a clue. I didn’t expect it, but that anyone did, and that a political movement may coalesce around folks like her is a chilling thought.
Today’s short piece follows up on jobs, and includes a shout out to an equally strong piece in today’s Times by Bob Herbert, who adds a journalist’s take to the same problem, structural unemployment.
Although we may still produce lots of jobs in the service economy, service is ultimately not how we bring wide spread prosperity. Only when people make things, or grow them (farming) do economies develop the widespread distribution of the means of raising families and buying each other’s goods that creates the bustle of a successful economy. The financial sector may be helpful to fund enterprise, but it is ultimately just a service and its activities represent the equivalent of a tax on the economy. One buzz phrase that is used in the commentariat is “knowledge workers” – as if all we needed were more of them to solve our long-term problem. We should not that we can’t convert all to “knowledge work” but even if we could, knowledge workers are a mixed bag. Some work in the manufacturing sector, among them programmers and engineers. Other knowledge workers are folks like me who labor in the finance sector. I work hard, but I produce nothing.
Again, we need to make things, or grow things (and fish for them too! – but for the purposes of this piece, I’ll include fishing within agriculture). By the way, extractive industry, however useful, is problematical. Contrast the difference in prosperity between agricultural regions, which have historically been prosperous (though losing out in recent decades) and coal mining regions (or regions with oil and gas extraction) where the workers are, by and large, dirt poor. Oh, the owners do fine. And southern agriculture is an exception, for reasons having a lot to do with race.
Fifty or sixty years ago, we told ourselves that free trade and the free flow of capital would make our economy even better. Over the decades, the GDP has gone up – but good jobs for workers have declined. There were good reasons for free trade that had more to do with helping the world rebuild after WW2, but that is a political and not an economic question. And since the rebuilding was done by the late 1960s, we could have reconsidered international trade some 40 years ago. We didn’t, but kept up our destructive reliance on free trade.
That should be recognized as a major problem. Instead, free trade is accepted uncritically.
We need a serious reappraisal of trade policy, and we need policy that give an honest appraisal of free trade’s failure to deliver.
The ideal of free trade only works only if all sides play fair. (I have my doubts even if they do play fair.) Our biggest competitor now is the Chinese, and they don’t play our game. Where we mostly look for mutual benefit, the Chinese look for their advantage only, with a heavy reliance on deceit. They also manipulate their currency, and we stand by with our hands over our eyes pretending we don’t see. Actually, we see now, but it is years late.
We gave away our industrial capacity so that suburban knowledge workers could buy cheap underwear and household goods. The jobs we lost were worth a lot more.
As with other posts, there are lots of ideas behind this simple one. If you want me to flesh out a point or two, please ask me.
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I will get to the video at the end.
I just finished reading Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer. Since it’s my first run through, I didn’t catch everything. Still, two notions stood out as especially relevant to today. The first is that a mass movement arises from a population of frustrated individuals. The second is that the words that bring the mass movement together don’t have to relate in any way to what frustrates, they just have to compel.
One frustrated population is Muslims across the globe, but especially in the Middle East; those who perform the terrorist deeds are not the poorest, but often those closest to the West, who recoil and repudiate the west and its relative openness and freedom. Still, I don’t want this to sound like a patriotic rant – some portion of their frustration comes from the remaining aftershocks from the long and slow collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the face of Western industrialization. And one suspects that were “we” not over there, that frustrated Muslims would express their frustration in a less aggressive manner.
I am much more interest in another group of frustrated individuals, the dispossessed small town Americans whose reaction to the displacement of rural life by suburbanization (with its reliance on knowledge workers) is the current conservative backlash. It is no accident that last fall’s election featured “Joe the Plumber” or that Sarah Palin’s husband is a fisherman. Workers who work with their hands have lost out as small towns with their tradesmen and small shops gave way to malls. The mechanic who once was at the center of active small town life is now an invisible man on a back street somewhere. The people with money don’t see him, and if they do, they are repelled.
Ok, the video. Because of the presence of mass communications, folks like Glen Beck have been able to achieve real power. They don’t use it yet, and maybe our traditions of freedom would stop the worst from happening. Still, America has never had a movement led by a compelling fanatic. There is nothing that says it couldn’t happen here.
New Jersey has a new governor, Chris Christie. And yes, he sure is fat, but beyond his being overweight, he also carries the heavy burden of attempting to govern a state at a time when government seems impossible. Nearly all of our states face budget crises, as the economy and demographics have combined to increase mandated public spending while at the same time, reducing revenues.
The states need to reduce the number of employees as well as wages and benefits – especially public pensions, which are as unrealistic as were those devised by our self absorbed automobile unions. But unlike GM or Chrysler, the states cannot easily rid themselves of their impossible burden.
While a governor may be responsible for the budget, the solution requires legislation, and since lawmakers shy away from raising taxes, but at the same time, keep adding new obligations, we keep moving farther and farther away solvency.
Even worse for governor Christie, the NJ legislature is controlled by Democrats, while he is a Republican. Arnold Schwarzenegger faces the same problem in California. But even when the governor and legislature share a political party, governing does not come easy, just ask Democratic governor David Paterson (D-NY).
The problem is the separation between the legislative and executive branches, a problem for both the states and our unruly national government. While separation may make tyranny impossible, it also prevents necessary legislation – furthermore, legislators devote themselves to parochial rather than national interests. We saw this with health care where various Democratic senators held up the bill to get something special for their voters. In a parliamentary system, when a bill fails to pass, this can be the basis for ending a government, and the reformation of the governing coalition. Legislators in the ruling coalition rarely wish to take a risk by voting against legislation, lest a bill fail, and the party in the majority ends up in the minority. As much as we see legislative failure nationally, we see it in states as well. Last year in NJ the Democratic legislature refused to increase our state gasoline tax, despite the fact that ours is among the lowest in the nation, and our transportation fund was nearly empty. And the legislature of both California and New York are wildly dysfunctional.
We in NJ will have the pleasure of watching another new governor crash and burn.
Nationally, President Obama will continue with his struggle too, a struggle caused not by a failure of his ideas, but by our being reliance upon an obsolete governing model that was developed with but one reason, and that was to prevent tyranny. Tyranny may have seemed a pressing issue some 230 years ago – but it is about time to move on to new ideas.
A request to read this carefully.
While I did mention absurd union contracts, I don’t find unions to be absurd. They are one of the institutions that created the prosperity of the 1950s and early 60s. But, cultural factors within the American psyche prevent unions from recognizing when they go too far. Examples of going too far are with the airline unions that struck Eastern Airlines in 1989 and stood back as Eastern and all of its jobs vanished, or the newspaper unions that destroyed the Herald Tribune and Journal American in the debacle that was the World Journal Tribune. The so called “rubber room” for school teachers in New York City is but another absurdity created by union feather bedding. Unions have been good, and been destructive.
Re the health reform bill, despite aggressive polling and interpretation of meaning, it seems clear that the majority of Americans want a federal health program similar to Medicare. That such a bill cannot be passed says almost all you need to say about our collapsed political system.
Regarding salaries and benefits for public employees, I am not saying that specific salaries are too high, but I am saying that we need to think carefully before adding to the public payroll. An example comes from NJ just a few years ago. Revenues seemed to be good that year, and out of nowhere, the Republican governor, and Democratic legislature passed a bill increasing pension benefits across the board for non union employees. It was an election year, so each side was pandering to public employees, but it made no sense at all except to garner a little more support for a single election cycle.
Am I the only one? Like Christopher Buckley, I am a conservative* voter who voted for Barack Obama. Like Buckley, I too remain an admirer. By the way, read Buckley’s witty reaction to this week’s State of the Union Address.
All presidents are elected after a period of wooing that creates an excitement and tension similar to that that occurs with American children as they wait for Christmas morning. And just as it is with Christmas gifts, so it is in the months after the election; it turns out that neither Christmas gifts nor new presidents are the change agents we seek.**
Yet the media continues to tell us an untrue story about the president’s influence. Each turn in the economy, every international incident, and every change in the social mood is added to the president’s list of accomplishments or failures. So as Obama retains America’s empire, and makes deals with moderates, the left is dispirited. Similarly, the right screams that Obama is not working with them, so has not changed the political climate. The left is earnest, the right is not – they never had the least intention of helping find a new consensus.
* What passes for conservatism is an anti-intellectual set of ideas that have their beginnings in right wing racist radio from the pre-civil rights era. Northern Republicans found it useful to build a majority based on the old Dixie-crat constituency. That they did, and that the more extreme racism has faded, does not alter the ideological underpinnings.
Conservatives who exist outside of America’s peculiar version have historically supported the institutions that sustained political and social stability. For America, these institutions include Social Security and Medicare (now decades old) as well as bi-cameral legislatures and separation of powers. It should be no surprise the Whittaker Chambers chided fellow conservatives over their taking issue with Social Security. (Please google Whittaker Chambers!) The shrub’s failed effort to destroy Social Security should be seen now not only as misguided but as radical, and frankly, at one spiritually with the complaints of slave holders from the early days of our Republic, who constantly inveighed against any federal spending outside of the bare minimum required to keep the edifice of government going. Oh, they also loved war too!
The Post WW2 American empire is also now a fixed part of our make-up. It may have been a mistake to create the edifice of empire, but dismantling it abruptly would disturb a host of relationships across the globe, impacting everything from Japan’s national security to commerce and banking. If we understand what conservatism really is (and separate Northern conservatism from the Dixie-crat version) we can see in Obama (and in Bill Clinton too) a spirit of caution and moderation that should be applauded by cautious spirits everywhere, sadly, the cautious spirits have been silenced by noisy rabble rousers, and the empty calories of 24/7 news.
**Ok , maybe FDR was transformational, but the crisis was deep, and his strong majority allowed him to pass an aggressive program. Even still, the South remained the backward sewer of bigotry that only now is ending. JFK too may have been a change agent, but if we consider the decade as a whole, we can see a host of big changes that had little to do with the swoon that occurred after Kennedy’s exciting inaugural.
