Continuing on Mr. Obama’s “you didn’t build that” statement and the discussion that it seems to have inspired regarding the future role of big government in America: I also hope that Mr. Obama will expand this discussion to the difficult but inherent choice between maximum economic growth versus a fairer distribution of wealth. I hope that he will be honest with the public and not sugar-coat this issue in the name of politics. <\/p>\n
Let’s face it; if you want maximum economic growth for the nation as a whole, as Mr. Reagan proposed in the 1980’s, the rich are going to get richer at the expense of just about everyone else. If you impose mechanisms to share the wealth, if you install mechanisms that somewhat reduce entrepreneurial incentives and raise the cost of government oversight (i.e., via higher taxes), then you will NOT get maximum economic growth. If you impose too much government regulation and redistribution, you can stop growth altogether and start the nation on the road to poverty (perhaps Greece is the latest case-in-point; and let’s not forget Cuba and North Korea, poster children for the Soviet bloc nations of the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s). <\/p>\n
Side note: It is my opinion that one of humanity’s biggest challenges is to find a political economy that continually creates wealth through growth and innovation, and yet distributes its wealth relatively evenly while still allowing political and personal freedom. In pre-historical days, humans lived in hunter-gatherer tribes where just about everyone had the same level of material being, and there was no economic growth. Only after history began and the first rulers and kings and armies emerged from these tribes, and after tribes began to specialize and trade amongst each other, did economic growth allow some people to enjoy vastly better lives than others, in terms of food, shelter, clothing and luxuries. The masses accepted nominal improvements to their lot in exchange for the loss of freedom imposed by these power elites. They accepted that there had to be leadership, and members of the leadership demanded to be treated better than the average peasant (they didn’t get to be leaders by being shrinking violets). <\/p>\n
These trends started around 10,000 years ago in the Nile and Euphrates valleys, soon emerged in China, continued through Biblical times and through the centuries of Roman dominance, then into medieval times and hardly changed despite the Renaissance and the rise and fall of various empires around the world. Only for a few decades following the Second World War did an extensive middle class arise in America, followed by Europe and Japan. Russia experimented with a radical redistribution system which attempted to foster economic growth while severely limiting personal and political freedoms. For a time, this system improved living conditions for the masses while still allowing growth, but eventually it collapsed. Today, the gaps between the rich, the middle class and the poor have stopped shrinking and are returning to levels more typical of the start of the 20th Century. The big exception to this reversal appear to be happening in China and India; but these nations have a long way to go before they deliver to their masses what the average American and European came to expect in the 1960s and 70s. <\/p>\n
So where is the ‘sweet spot’ between too much government control and too much unfettered capitalism? And if we impose greater government involvement, how do we assure the public that this government is truly acting in its behalf, and is not a powerful elite acting to maximize its own power and wealth (as the Republicans are so fond of saying these days in their attacks on government workers). When government is small, e.g. in a village or a rural county, there is a lot of volunteer involvement on the part of the citizens being governed, such as unpaid school boards. <\/p>\n
On the federal level, is there any volunteer spirit remaining? The White House, Congress, the EPA, the Pentagon, the Supreme Court, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services . . . can they hear the voices and concerns of everyday people in Spartanburg, South Carolina or Green River, Wyoming or Lima, Ohio or Lincoln, Nebraska or Boise, Idaho? They certainly hear from Goldman Sachs and Exxon Mobil and Yale University and the Washington Post and the Ford Foundation . . . they hear from Congressmen who are continually lobbied by big interests . . . but should the average people trust these voices? Do these interests really know better than the masses? Why should average people trust the feds, if they aren’t involved in what those feds do everyday?<\/p>\n
If the President is going to convince those average citizens to give greater power over their everyday lives to federal politicians and bureaucrats, he needs to do better than to say “well, this is better than allowing Bain Capital to determine your fate”. He needs to imagine new ways to inject localism into the huge, impersonal machinery of big government. He needs to inspire new-found trust for Washington out in the boondocks. He needs to find ways to allow ‘ordinary Joes and Janes’ to get involved, e.g. with the Congressional Budgeting Office, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the health care planning agencies that will implement Obamacare (assuming that the GOP does not incite these ordinary people to annul Obamacare, and all the good it can do for them, in a fit of distrust), etc. <\/p>\n
The Tea Party movement is a clear warning. Mr. Obama and his supporters need to take it VERY seriously, much more so than they have to date. Obama needs to convince the Partiers that they did NOT build what they know in their daily lives. Better said, they did NOT build it ALONE. Obama and the Dems need better ways to convince ordinary people that the federal powers that he wishes to increasingly impose in their lives are not controlled by some distant “BIG BROTHER”; but on the contrary, involve people just like them. Otherwise, the new revolutionaries WILL dump much of our existing nation-wide government structure into the bay, without considering the value of what they are disposing (just like the 1774 Revolutionaries thought not about the value of the tea which they tossed into Boston Harbor). <\/p>\n