I'm not sure how coherent your argument below is. Let's suppose we could trust the other guy to do the "right thing." Would it then be morally OK for us to relax, knowing he'd pick up our slack? No, of course not. If you believe there is a "right thing" to do, then it's the right thing because you're supposed to do it no matter what, even if you're the only good person left on Earth.
If by "doing our individual best," you mean taking care of yourself when times get tough and forgetting about others, well.... No. I disagree. Charity and safety nets matter the most when times are really tough.
Indeed, government has a role to play now. You lament that you can't count on the "other guy" anymore. Well, that's precisely why government's needs to make the other guy ante up (especially the top 5% who have enjoyed so much increase in wealth over the past 30 years), so that we all can count on each other. I'm not convinced we should spend $1 trillion on stimulus, but government is going to have to spend a lot of money, no doubt.
There is going to be a lot of suffering over the next year or so, maybe longer. This is uncharted territory. And yet many seem to take some sick pleasure from the prospect of such suffering -- the same people, I suspect, who enjoy "teaching people a lesson," who relish pointing the finger and offering a holier-than-thou lecture whenever somebody falls down. But did you ever stop and wonder why it is always the poor and middle class clock-punchers who must learn (and re-learn) all these important, stoical, "real American" lessons about life, as if they were the billion-dollar gamblers, as if they were the irresponsible louts who gamed the banking system to show huge profits and hide a mountain of piling debt, or collected seven-figure bonuses by maximizing short-term gains at the expense of long-term value? What moral lessons have those rich, hotshot SOBs learned from all of this?
When bankers and traders engaged in legalized, unregulated gambling with derivatives and credit default swaps, practiced insider trading and cooked the books as their mortgage banks went under, devised "teaser" loans to fool ignorant borrowers, and gamed Wall Street's financial system to maximize their salary and bonuses, well... those were just the excesses of roaring capitalism. After all, their greed fuels the machine that feeds us all. But when a union worker asks for a wage increase to exceed inflation, plus health benefits and a pension, well... he is a lazy piece of shit who is ruining our economy. He is a goddamn socialist. He (and his father before him) should have known better. His "greed" is completely out of bounds.
Some people (ahem!) think that Wall Street was just plain dumb, they didn't know what they were doing when they were creating all those $ billions in mega-leveraged debt. They can't be blamed, despite their high IQs and Ivy League MBAs and PhDs, for pushing the global economy over the brink. Yet the blue-collar union worker should have known full well that he was destroying his own job, his company, and indeed America's manufacturing base by negotiating with his management for the highest wages and benefits he could get. The union worker, despite his high school education, and the sudden confluence of global economic forces beyond his control and often his understanding, was nevertheless knowledgeable and personally culpable and therefore deserves his sudden joblessness and our collective scorn.
Don't you see the gross double standard at work in this reasoning? Moreover, don't you see the gross imbalance in the effect on our economy of Wall Street's greed and recklessness vs. auto unions' "greed"? And yet you reserve a special disdain for the simple, middle-class union worker, who is probably a defender of the basic Christian "family values" that you treasure. Don't you see that you, this kid who wrote this op-ed, and most Republicans are suckers for a class of people who don't give two shits about you, and who are laughing all the way to the mega-merger of their bank (paid for by you)?
Don't you see the gross double standard at work in this reasoning? Moreover, don't you see the gross imbalance in the effect on our economy of Wall Street's greed and recklessness vs. auto unions' "greed"? And yet you reserve a special disdain for the simple, middle-class union worker, who is probably a defender of the basic Christian "family values" that you treasure. Don't you see that you, this kid who wrote this op-ed, and most Republicans are suckers for a class of people who don't give two shits about you, and who are laughing all the way to the mega-merger of their bank (paid for by you)?
I'm not defending the unions all the way, but let's acknowledge that there is only one kind of greed -- the greedy kind. If you think that a white-collar banker's greed is somehow more virtuous because he's dealing with more zeroes and taking risks with somebody else's money, then please excuse me while I vomit. Indeed, if "greed is good," if overoptimism and risk-taking are what make capitalism go, then it's nonsensical to excoriate the losers and praise the winners alike because they were greedy, optimistic, and heedless of risk!
The book I'm reading now, The Black Swan, by Nicholas Taleb, a successful trader and self-styled philosopher, was at the forefront of my mind as I wrote the above. Wrote Taleb: "Capitalism is, among other things, the revitalization of the world thanks to the opportunity to be lucky." And: "As individuals we should love free markets because operators in them can be as incompetent as they wish," meaning, as incompetent, risk-taking, and overoptimistic as they wish to be without being able to hurt everybody else too badly, thanks to bankruptcy. Unlike government incompetence, which affects us all and rarely results in the government's disintegration. Taleb is convinced that most successful businesses and businessmen were simply lucky. That's all. Just being in the right place at the right time.
On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 6:36 PM, < > wrote:
Choices would be more clear if we could TRUST our fellow man. It's a reminder to all of us to complete our committments and practice responsibility.It is more true today than ever, that saving the nation and world begins with each one of us doing our individual best. We can't count on the "other guy".
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