Is Ours the America of George Bailey or Ayn Rand?

If you are familiar with It’s A Wonderful Life, you’ll remember Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey.  He was the moral center and protagonist.  At a key moment he goes  in front of his building-and-loan’s board of directors to explain why his shabby business should remain opened (his business readily lent to working folks): “doesn’t it (owning a home) make them better citizens, doesn’t it make them better customers,” and so on.

Mr. Potter is George Bailey’s evil foil.  His 19^th century capitalist point of view is ardently represented by Ayn Rand’s romantic fiction.  Oddly, despite her complete cluelessness about business, she was taken seriously by some very serious folks, including Alan Greenspan, who was a leading voice in the retrograde movement that stripped regulations from our financial system.  In Rand’s vision, greed is very, very good.  Last year we finally found out why it is not!

Unlike European conservatism, which accepts the social programs that are at the center of Western European policy, American conservatives continue to reject them.   Of course, there are a minority of conservatives whose writing incorporates an appreciation of the value of institutions from public education to social security (David Brooks’ is one of more accessible representatives of this viewpoint.)  But most of what serves as conservative opinion is Victorian in its rhetoric, with the media expression of this point of view reduced to rantings from loudmouths (think Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh).

The simplistic version of conservatism can be simplified thus: America’s values are represented best by the ruthless strivers who built our economy by the sweat of the brows without help from anyone.  We should be grateful for their benefaction and not put a damper on the party by taxation or regulations.  (On top of 19^th century economics, conservatives have added a sprig leaf of Bible Belt Christianity, and flag waiving militarism.)

Well the simple view is a delusion.

To begin with, America has always had an alternate set of values based upon community.  And, our communitarian values go back to our founding.  The first two English colonies were Massachusetts and Virginia.  While Virginia represents the ruthless strivers – it was founded by and for profiteers – Massachusetts was founded in order to be a community of religious strivers, with an emphasis on community.   For an easy read about the Puritans and the founding of Massachusetts, try The Wordy Shipmates.   For the story of the plantation south, try any good biography of one of our Virginia founding fathers.  This one from Joseph Ellis includes a glimpse into the business side of Washington’s farm (though the running of the plantation is only a small part of the biography).  To make money, Washington and his peers burned through acres and acres of land in a form of slash and burn agriculture – by the time he died, his land holdings went from Virginia to the Ohio valley.

It turns out, our ruthless strivers have made their money from a stacked deck  In the colonial era, wealth in the plantation South represented the thefts of both labor and land (labor stolen from slaves, and land from the Indians).  After nationhood, plantation owners continued to steal more land from the remaining Indians (read up on the Trail of Tears) and eventually from Mexico – while their slaves did all the hard and dirty work.

In the north, the stacked deck is best represented by the era of railroad building.  In order to inspire would be railroaders to cross the continent, land was given away to convincing entrepreneurs.  A typical grant might by 47 Million acres (approximately 10 New Jerseys).  This land was alternately sold, harvested for lumber or saved for commercial development.  Then there were the rails themselves.  US made steel was much more expensive than British steel (until the discovery of much better iron ore from the Mesabi range).  But US steel producers had price protection in the form of a protective tariff. So free land begat railroad companies who in turn purchased protected US steel (eventually, most of it was made by Carnegie).  Railroads were themselves monopolies (since you can’t simply go out and build a competing railroad – Carnegie tried at one point).  Rails built the steel industry, and both railroads and steel mills consumed acres of coal.  Towns were built up with steel and then lined with trees carrying copper wire.

The stacked deck included rigged freight rates that advantaged the big shipper and screwed his competitor (this was the net neutrality issue of its day, eventually corrected by the interstate commerce commission).

Yet a communitarian America also existed.  In the north and Midwest, towns slowly established public schools, teachers colleges, and (with Federal funding) land grant colleges – the ubiquitous “Ag” schools that eventually became a network of great state universities.  Towns also established water and sewage systems, public libraries, and eventually building codes and fostered public health.  Western states followed the eastern/Midwestern pattern, but the south, other than building a few colleges, limited public improvement to a few of its towns (and for whites only).

Communities generate their own form of commerce, and from commerce followed wealth.  The great retail engines were founded in the same 19^th century (from The A&P, our first great grocery chain, to Sears and Montgomery Ward).  Public means of sharing information were needed, and so we saw the founding of great newspapers (Heart) magazines and eventually, movie studios and radio networks.  We also began to see the great consumer inventions, from the light bulb and telephone, to the phonograph, sewing machine and eventually the toaster.  (Electric light led to the need for electric power, and that was the power source for a host of labor saving devices).

Unlike the commerce of our robber barons, the communitarian commerce was truly competitive and not monopolistic (except for power and telephone networks which from an economics standpoint were naturally monopolistic.)  And, except for utilities, where abuses occurred, it was individual customers that mattered.

I won’t idealize the commerce or the era.  It was brutal too, and included all manner of abuse from terrible slums, to sweat shops, to tainted meat produced in unsanitary conditions.  Still, the communities where these injustices occurred were themselves the engines of reform, from building codes, child labor laws and a host of measures that became the enduring legacy of the progressive era.

Sadly, the progressive era was so successful that we forget why it happened.  Thus it is that the audience for “Tea Bag” protests will be Medicare beneficiaries, and suburban folks who send their kids to public schools.

The moral:

When a flag waiving moron screams that by… stopping oil drilling in the Alaskan wilds, or by using our shared wealth (taxes) to improve the health care system, or by controlling emissions from power plants, that we are abandoning our values, a true conservative should be reminding them that they need a values check.

Afterward:

When in 2001, George Bush II and VP Dick Cheney met with energy industry insiders to set energy policy, remember that the energy barons were extracting their oil and gas from our public land.  So, as much as their recommendations were made to sound like it was all for our benefit, in the end, it was all about their being able to turn a public resource into their private wealth.