I Had a Dream

More than a few writers have pointed out that the dominant "meme" -- i.e. the story we tell ourselves, over and over and over, not unlike a myth but more in the present tense -- of America, at least in the economic area, is one of inevitable and perpetual prosperity, expansion, and "growth", i.e. an always-increasing standard of living which might or might not be shared with less-deserving nations and peoples, depending. This, of course, is always accompanied by the political meme of "democracy" (our way, of course -- you know, like the two-party system, unlike those messy affairs over in Europe) and the social memes of "equal rights", "non-discrimination", and the relative newcomer, "diversity". And then there are all the mini-memes that sort of feed into the larger ones, like "we're hard workers", and "we believe in 'family'" (like, what culture doesn't? I suppose the ones that are dying), and "we can take a joke" (tell Ahmadinejad!). But in any case, the dominant economic meme, as those writers also point out, had a grain of truth to it as long as we enjoyed virtually limitless supplies of free, or at least cheap, land and the resources that went with it -- like wind and water power, soil fertility, natural avenues of commerce, and a relative lack of opposition from the natives. (At least the U.S. has never fallen for the myth that it was "a land without a people for a people without a land", the way the Israelis have.) To put it another way -- as long as there was a frontier, i.e. a leading edge of settlement that had not yet reached the Pacific Coast (or converged somewhere in between) it was not unrealistic to "believe in" things like growth, perpetual prosperity, and the like. And sure enough, a funny thing happened just about the time the frontier "closed" (except for Alaska, I guess, which was not a state at the time) -- we started looking beyond our borders for new challenges, new lands to conquer (or at least peoples to dominate), new "markets", new sources of cheap labor, and all the rest of it. This began in earnest with the first shots of the Spanish-American War, and reached a spiritual peak, if you will, with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. In their day, it was perfectly acceptable to boost, and boast of, a growing American Empire. Since World War I our empire-building activities have had to become a bit more subtle, but they have remained one of our main foreign policy agenda items. I would say that the first, and most serious to date, incident of "pushback" on our empire building was Vietnam... but we are getting pushback a'plenty in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, and at least some healthy skepticism in other quarters, including among our "allies". And the point is that one of our goals -- whether stated or not -- in all of this was to extend, in time, our period of economic expansion -- i.e. to maintain growth and prosperity on the home front by gaining control and dominance over various economic entitites overseas. In this, of course, the effort was aided by American businesses, who had everything to gain and very little to lose by encouraging us to move into an area (militarily, most likely), co-opt the right people, take over the right functions, and then basically turn the whole business over to "the private sector" until such time as they had a rebellion on their hands, at which point the Marines would come sailing in and make everything right. And this was, in fact, the "business model" for much of our overseas dealing for many decades. And of course it made the people at the top of the heap very rich, but it also benefited ordinary people as well. For example, would Americans have adopted bananas as one of their favorite fruits if we hadn't taken over vast reaches of Central America with all of its cheap labor? What if bananas in 1950 had cost what melons cost in Tokyo today? I don't think you'd be getting them in smoothies. So yes, even though we no longer had a visible, palpable "frontier", we continued to reap all of the benefits, thanks to our international reach.

But then more funny things started to happen. I've already mentioned Vietnam. But we had also had the Depression -- all the banana plantations in the world couldn't keep us out of that. And as a result, a form of semi-soft socialism was instituted in this country, which continues to this day. This, in turn, is responsible for titanic inefficiencies, waste, and corruption -- which is to say, socialism was the first, and is still the biggest, single drain on our resources (by "drain" I don't mean from us to someone else, but from the productive sector to the non-productive sector). Another major blow was taking our currency off the gold, or silver, or chopped liver, or any objective, tangible standard, which rendered it of no intrinsic value and completely dependent, for what value it did have, on the confidence of the citizens, and the rest of the world as well, in the American economy. The dollar, in other words, acquired the status of a stock certificate in America Inc., and as a result it would rise and fall solely on the basis of the uncertain fortunes of the American economy and the American empire. Add to this the crushing legal and regulatory burden of doing business in the U.S. -- especially for small businesses -- and you see that there has been a suppression, or chilling, impact on free enterprise through the machinations of the government -- again, having accelerated greatly after World War II, although the groundwork had been laid decades earlier.

So what do we have? Socialism/collectivism (which includes all the "welfare state" entities and programs as well as public schools and government-owned or overseen enterprises that ought to be strictly private), funny money, and a mile-deep ocean of red tape. Something had to give, and it wasn't our aggressive foreign policy -- that's still alive and well, and still pursued primarily for the benefit of the war industries -- so it had to be on the domestic side. And no one president, or administration, or government agency, or program, is to blame -- the point is that they're _all_ to blame, along with all parasites in every rank of life, from street people to corporate CEOs, who live off the public dole... and the voters who keep all these clowns in power... and the citizenry in general, for not rising up in revolt on a more frequent basis. And the "psychology" of it is well established -- everyone thinks that if they vote for a government program -- or vote for someone who will -- that program is going to benefit them more than the sum total of all other government programs is going to hurt them. It's like people who go to Las Vegas expecting to come home rich, completely ignoring the fact that the casinos are all located in luxurious, multi-million-dollar buildings and that their owners are extremely wealthy. Where do they think all that money came from? But the power, and the charms, of self delusion are very strong. So we have the gambling addict, and we have the voting addict -- i.e. the guy who still believes he'll be better off under more socialism.

So now we get to the perfect storm -- the intersection among the frontier-empire complex, the increasing inefficiency and increasing corruption of government, and the increasing delusional state of the citizenry, combined with their actual total helplessness in the face of forces much bigger and more powerful than they are, or ever will be. Mix it all up and what have you got? The last two weeks' economic news. And it's not as if one really bad thing happened that set everything else off... there was no economic equivalent of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand; not really. It was more like what happens in mid-ocean, where suddenly a huge wave appears that no one expected -- a combination of forces that might have been vaguely, if at all, perceived ahead of time. Or you could think of it in that folksy way that I tend to favor: The termites quit holding hands. There is not one crashing-down piece of the economy that hasn't been "troubled" for quite a while, and in fact many have been on thin ice for years, if not decades -- not only in terms of balance sheets but in terms of incompetent, greedy, and corrupt management. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, never have so many gotten away with so much for so long. But now the laws of economics (which most "economists" have yet to discover) are kicking in, just like the laws of physics determine which rockets will escape the Earth's pull and which ones will come crashing back. And many of the folks who -- quite innocently perhaps, since no one ever told them any different -- "had a dream" -- from the standard "home on a golf course in Florida" to the slightly more modest "trailer on a good fishing lake in Central Florida" to the slightly more grandiose "condo in Key West" (Florida) -- are seeing this dream shattered and being replaced with a stern reality, also known as "what most people in the world down through history have had to look forward to in their old age, and what made you think you were so damn special?" And of course it's also drearily true that those responsible will walk -- i.e. back to their mansions and yachts and Lear jets -- and that the good old middle class, reliable and uncomplaining as ever, will pay the price. Don't expect the people who created this mess to "swing" (from the nearest lampost, as they ought) or even be mildly inconvenienced -- they are above it all. (All I need to provide as evidence is the current state of the art market.) No, it's the guy who expected his home in the 'burbs to give him a nice nest egg for retirement, since, after all, housing always goes up, right? And the guy who "invested" in the stock market the way a blind cow "invests" in clover since, after all, the guys running those companies know what they're doing, right? (Yes, they do -- they're taking your money and turning it into their money.)

But I don't just blame the "bourgeoisie" for clinging to God and guns -- oh wait, that's the rural poor, I meant "clinging to stocks and real estate". After all, those nice little savings accounts we grew up with have gone the way of the dodo -- thanks, once again, to the inflationary policies of the government. And not everyone is smart enough to deal in the "eternals", like precious gems, gold, and the like. (Throw in art if you want -- and antique cars.) So that nest egg money had to go somewhere, 'cause otherwise what was going to happen to that house on the 18th green? So it went into stocks, which were formerly the concern of people who actually knew something, but some genius realized that _he_could make even more money by talking ordinary middle-class chumps, er, honest citizens, into starting a "portfolio". And in fact, he could make even more by getting things like union retirement funds into the stock market. And... well, it's too late to privatize Social Security, and a lot of people are extremely grateful that we dodged that bullet. And the nest egg money also went into real estate, based on the "growth forever" model, which assumes that everyone else will also have more money to spend as time goes on. So in this sense it was the eradication of traditional "savings" that helped inflate the bubble. If you could still put money in a bank and watch it "grow" (albeit modestly) it would be one thing -- but you can't. Money that just sits there is going to shrink (and if it "grows" on paper, you'll be taxed on the growth part). So the government basically takes away the savings option, to the point where "savers" feel like fools. Then that same government turns around and complains about the poor "savings rate" of Americans! Talk about chutzpah! No, much better to chase people into stocks, real estate, and other high-risk (for them, not everyone) ventures, and then when the big boys decide to cash out -- which is, in some respects, what's happening now -- they're left holding... well, not much of anything. So the great American middle class gets shoved a few more notches down toward the poverty line, and the dream of a two-class system becomes more of a reality every day. Yes -- not _all_ dreams have been shattered, only the ones in the heads of the people who weren't vicious or ruthless enough to make them come true.