What if U.S. Social Fabric Tears? 29 comments
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The American Dream
The mythic story of America has been the American Dream. America has long held to be the Land of Opportunity, where people like Michael Dell could build an empire by selling computers out of his college dorm.
How much unravelling can the Dream take?
I posted previously that an OECD study showed that social mobility in the United States is actually lower than more “egalitarian” countries like Denmark and Norway. But those are only statistics and statistics don’t really impact the social psyche.
What is a greater concern to me is how the American Dream is unravelling in some parts of America in the wake of the Great Recession. A good example can be seen in a post at Naked Capitalism about the trials and tribulations of a family struggling with unemployment and credit card debt. Here are some messages from the family:
And:We haven’t eaten out in years, never pick up fast food, ever, don’t walk the malls, never received any public assistance, have a 2000 Tundra and a motorcycle to save on gas, make everything from scratch (even my own homemade laundry soap!)… frankly, I don’t know many folks around here that have saved for a stormy day. Saved? That’s a joke to most of us. We’ve gotten our phone disconnected and share a cell phone, we plan each and every trip to the store with a list of necessities, haven’t had a vacation in over 15 years, and up until my husband got a job last week, we were selling everything we could sell in the house on ebay. At least I am cleaning out the closets that haven’t been cleaned in years.
A Naked Capitalism reader responded [emphasis mine]:We had lentils and cornbread last night…yum yum, and we’ll heat them up tonight as well. I did mention that my husband got his first paycheck last Friday. Sent from Heaven. We celebrated with brats and homemade kraut and hard rolls! Beats a t-bone any day in our book. Hubby is from Austria, so he can make some great kraut.
Does the social fabric tear? How do people anchor expectations?I am astonished at how many readers you have who have no idea whatever how the financial bottom fourth or fifth of America lives. When I was a kid in western Kentucky I had a few classmates who lived in unpainted old clapboard houses out in the country, in some cases former slave quarters and so a century old. I remember one such house that even had a dirt floor. When I was little my mom’s parents lived in a tiny mountainside house in Appalachia that had no indoor plumbing. They hand pumped water from a well and heated it on a coal stove, and for a toilet across the dirt road there was an outhouse that hung out over and dumped onto the weeds on the descending slope. Stunk to high heaven, of course, and there were lots of bugs. At eight years of age, having to go in the middle of the night armed only with a flashlight was a character-building experience.
Things are a little better in the rural south now, but they sure aren’t good, now that the small farms are gone. In my adult life I’ve seen one relative living in a broken-down trailer with a caved-in roof and a goat tied up in the yard. And I’ve seen my cousin, with a small-college degree in math no less, getting by for a good while in the middle of nowhere, south Carolina on $9,000 a year from intermittent and part-time jobs. We can be all snooty about the poor not working hard enough, but I’ve also seen a sister quit a job pulling visibly diseased tissue off of Tyson chickens on a production line rather than get campylobacter one more time. We demand they live and act all middle class, but as a society we honestly don’t give them half a chance.
These guys who talk about saving hundreds of $thousands in small-town rural America are particularly irritating. How do you do that on $9K/year or $12K/year exactly? The US Census Bureau says in 2007 the bottom 20% of US households earned less than $19,178, so these are not trivial numbers of people. We never won our war on poverty really. We just forgot about it when the conservatives become obsessed with the hordes of welfare queens (and drag queens) that they imagined were filling our cities.
One of my big shocks when I started traveling more was to discover that compared to a lot of places a large part of the central and southern US (including parts of the upper Midwest) was actually what used to be called a third-world country, with way more poverty, illness, and borderline illiteracy than Europe et al. Re literacy I remember in Turkey seeing Chekov plays for sale at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. My Turkish friends thought it odd that I’d find that odd. To them it was perfectly reasonable that a truck driver might want something interesting to read.
As the Great Recession takes its toll on the bottom half of the US population, what happens if people move from America the Land of Opportunity to Third World America, the Land of “broken-down trailers with caved-in roofs and a goat tied up in the yard”?
The mood of America could very well turn from being aspirationally driven to one where “I want my slice of the pie.” The former promotes growth while the latter leads to social turmoil and is highly investor unfriendly. At its worst, it can result in socialist and communist tendencies if dominated by the Left, or skinhead-like tribalism if dominated by the Right (think KKK or even Hitler).
Where the middle class goes, so goes social stability. If there are significant tears in the social fabric, then does the world start anchoring on America the Superpower to America as another country, just like Brazil is another country?
Before you dismiss this as leftish claptrap, consider this Randall Forsyth commentary, in that bastion of socialism Barron's, about the captain and galley slaves who are at risk of getting thrown overboard. (And if this mentality is getting into the pages of Barron's, what does this say about the rest of the country?)
Watch this space. While I don’t believe that a descent into chaos is inevitable, it is definitely a risk and would create incredible social, political and financial upheaval not only in the United States, but the rest of the world.
Those risks are now just starting to show up in the currency and commodity markets.
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This article has 29 comments:
They do not go to Washington to serve their fellow man. They serve themselves at the cost to those who are the fabric of America. I believe we have been torn. The question is will we be shredded or mended?
We have a recession/depression here. We have scads of roads, bridges, tunnels, water pipelines and other infrastructure that needs rebuilt. We still have a lot of oil and natural gas that could be extracted and used. Washed-up DC spends almost a trillion dollars on a "stimulus" and what does it decide to do? Pass it out as toilet paper for their cronies back home. Blocks domestic energy production so we can instead employ people producing energy in Brazil and our pals Iran. And now they want to pile on more taxes and mandates (cap and trade, card check, health "reform") to ensure ever fewer jobs will be created in the next few years.
Whatever you think about him otherwise, Jim Cramer has a good thought... why don't they spend that stimulus money on creating natural gas infrastructure (pipelines, filling stations, etc) for the US? Gas is a relatively clean fuel we have in abundance. Building this out would both create jobs and and help solve the country's energy problem, two things we desperately need! Perhaps if we could find politicians who thought along these lines instead of "how can I pad my and my cronies pockets" there would be some REAL hope and change.
I don't see the argument that we live in a socialist economy. If we did, we wouldn't have the widespread misery that we encounter on a daily basis. Massive unemployment, declining wages and benefits: these don't usually go hand in hand with socialism. But they do go in hand with a capitalist economy run amock.
We need to make sure that EVERYBODY pays their fair share of taxes. You can't maintain a high standard of living if we keep issuing tax cuts while shifting jobs overseas. We are starting to feel the results of these bad fiscal policies, tax revenues to maintain our roads and schools are gone.
I do think, however, that you left out a very important dynamic underlying the economic one. I think the moral fabric of our country has already experienced some serious stresses and tears and that the potential breakdown of that moral fabric is more of a threat to our society and culture than even a class war type situation.
Once a society loses its sense of morality all bets are off.
I think we've already seen a lot of this lack of morality in the financial sector in the form of some of the unmitigated and heartless greed, highlighted of course, by the Madoff fiasco. But if those are or were isolated instances of just a few miscreants, I think a healthy society could survive. But I think the rot goes much deeper.
Several years ago I remember listening to a former teacher relate a story about how he had been asked to substitute for a day or two in a class and agreed to come out of retirement to do so.
I'm not sure how the subject originally came up, but at some point in he asked the class a pointed moral question. "If you wanted something really really bad and you saw it in a store and knew with absolute certainty that you could steal it and not get caught, who would do so?"
He said to his astonishment that the entire class raised their hands. Taken aback, he asked "But isn't stealing wrong?"
Student after student informed him that many people might think it is wrong, and perhaps he did, but neither he nor anyone else should impose their own particular morality on others. Because the answers were so similar from student to student, and with a little additional digging he finally figured out that that was what the school was teaching them. That type of "morality" was a part of the curriculum.
As an insurance broker, I am required to take continuing education courses, and one of the newer requirements is to get some hours in "ethics". A couple of years a company offered a little half day seminar that included credit for a couple of hours of ethics, and included a free lunch so I gladly accepted.
There are a number of issues that come up in our field that provide moral dilemmas or at least decision points where we have to do some discerning about the morality of choices we face. I was looking forward to the highlighting of such choices and a good discussion of the ethics involved in confronting them.
I was disappointed, however, when the class turned out to essentially be a giant advertisement for Starbucks. They were giving away Starbucks books and coffee cups etc. and the instructor was really hyping how well their stock was doing and so on. It took a little while until the connection to ethics for insurance agents and brokers finally manifested itself.
Starbucks' philosophy was one of being a very "green" company and also very "inclusive". They had a big emphasis on recycling and using recycled products from environmentally aware companies. They also made a point of hiring people not only with disabilities, but also with alternative lifestyles, such as homosexuals.
I was disappointed of course at this obviously politically correct interpretation of ethics, and was also surprised at how much emphasis seemed to be placed on how this translated into profits and a soaring stock price.
Oh well, I figured I was at least getting a few free credit hours and decided to enjoy my free lunch and write off a wasted morning.
But at some point in the proceedings someone decided to bring the meeting back to what I had expected, the actual topic of ethics. Actually, it wasn't bringing it back, it was bringing it up for the first time.
Unfortunately, I must have been reaching for a drink of Starbucks coffee or something and missed much of the original question from the audience. But her response was similar to what the kids in the aforementioned school had heard from *their* instructors.
~ "Well, ethics is a very personal thing, and *your* set of ethics might be very different from mine, or someone else's." I perked up a little and sure enough someone, perhaps the original questioner responded to her answer with another question... "But what if a terrorist kicked in the door to this room and started gunning people down, don't you think that would be unethical?"
Her answer, which I hope would be astonishing to most people, is unfortunately, more pervasive in some areas of our society than many would imagine, continued on consistently with her premise...
~ "Well maybe it would seem unethical to me or to you, but it might be quite ethical to those doing so. They might feel they have good and valid, even heroic reasons for doing so..."
Unfortunately, the discussion pretty much ended there. I don't know if it was just that the participants felt much as I did that it was a hopeless cause trying to change her mind in such a venue with such a limited amount of time, or if some actually agreed with her, or perhaps more likely, that she steered things away from that hot topic and back towards her original agenda so we could finish the meeting on time and get to that lunch. I think she just didn't call on anyone that raised their hand at that point.
When the French historian and political writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, came to America in the 1830s to study why the US experiment in democracy seemed to be doing so well despite many predictions to the contrary, he wrote of his experiences during that study of American culture.
He made strong note of the moral character of American culture at the time, how the churches were full on Sunday mornings among other things that made a strong impact upon him. He did also note that he felt there was a strong element of "indifferentism", an acceptance of differences of opinion on worship and morality, that perhaps helped keep the peace and yet he thought that might be the sowing of seeds for future problems.
I think that has been the case, and that that indifferentism has spread much farther since the underlying national Judeo-Christian moral code permeated American culture due largely to immigration from Europe, aka "Christendom".
Now we try to not only accomodate non-Christian ideals and sensibilities, into our moral fabric, but even atheistic ones. There have even been suits to accommodate satanic rituals in our prisons.
It is my personal opinion that these accommodations are untenable in the long run and that will bring about some earthquakes in our society and societal structure.
Unfortunately, "the lowest common moral denominator" among all cultures, religions and beliefs is pretty close to non-existent. Many/most of those beliefs can, of course be accommodated without much difficulty, but others are core values that are in diametrical conflict with each other.
Whether "The Lord's Day" is on Saturday or Sunday or some other day is not all that divisive on a societal scale, nor is the shape of the church or which direction it faces, or which songs are played or myriad other details.
But whether or not a marriage requires a man and a woman is a pretty big issue, as is whether or not it can ever be acceptable to deliberately kill innocent human beings.
I think the deterioration in our moral fabric has progressed further and faster than many realize. I've read a number of stories about how police and judges are amazed at the complete lack of sorrow by those committing even quite heinous crimes.
I remember one where a young boy, probably 6 or 7 years old had pushed a much younger child off a balcony to her death. He felt no remorse or compassion and in fact felt quite justified, since she had grabbed one of his toys.
Another was a teen who had shot and killed store owner he was robbing. Even though the man had several small children, the young man said he wished it didn't have to happen, but he was completely justified in killing him. He had after all told the man not to move, but he moved a bit and that worried him so he "had to kill him".
I read another study where students, presumably in an inner city environment, were asked about what their response should be if someone "dissed" them. The overwhelming response was that person deserved to be killed. No one blinked at the question or felt there was anything wrong with killing that person in cold blood. That was just their own particular moral code.
Similarly, psychologists who studied the history of the leader in the Columbine killings came to the conclusion that he was a psychopath. He had no moral conscience. Neither killing, theft, murder, torture or anything else bothered him any more than wiping someone out on a video game would have. It was a phenomenon that they had tracked back through his history all the way back to his early childhood. Their conclusion was that it wasn't an issue of "bullying" as made out in the media, but of a complete and utter lack of morals and of a conscience.
I remember a lawyer who wrote after a shooting somewhere about the fever in the media to outlaw guns. She noted that when she went to high school, the vast majority of the boys drove pickup trucks to school and virtually every one had a gun rack hanging behind the driver's seat. She said they periodically had fights, but that no one would have ever even considered running out to get a gun. It was a non-issue.
Since then, our courts have mandated taking prayers out of schools, taking down any postings of the 10 commandments, including the admonition that "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and people are astonished at the growth in lawlessness throughout the land. That tearing of the moral fabric is not fixed by putting more metal detectors at the doorways and guards in the hallways.
- Samuel Adams
As in the Depression, that has now changed. Business has helped to create a labor surplus through off shoring and outsourcing. This will undermine American's traditional support for capitalism (as happened in the Depression).
It will also lessen the need for innovation, which usually centered around inventions that saved labor costs.
John Kay of the Financial Times has recently written a nice article explaining why the chaos of free
markets leads to significantly better results than centrally-planned economies, as has been tried and failed
in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Nigeria, and Haiti (and periodically makes inroads in economies
found in Great Britain, the United States, and others.)
Kay explains that free markets generate superior results because:
Prices act as signals – the price mechanism is a guide to resource allocation rather than central planning.
Markets are a process of discovery – an economy adapts to change through a chaotic process of
experimentation. The third element is the capacity of the market to bring about diffusion of political and
economic power. This is the most effective way to protect society from rent-seeking – a culture in which
the principal route to wealth is not creating wealth, but attaching oneself to wealth created by others...
... Centralized systems experiment too little. They find reasons why new proposals will fail – and mostly
they are right. But market economies thrive on a continued supply of unreasonable optimism. And when,
occasionally, experiments succeed, they are quickly imitated.
If market economies are better at originating and diffusing new ideas, they are also better at disposing of
failed ones. Honest feedback is not welcome in large bureaucracies, as the UK government’s drug
advisers can testify. In authoritarian regimes, such reporting can be fatal to the person who delivers it.
Disruptive innovations most often come to market through new entrants. The health of the market
economy depends on constant replenishment of ideas, often from unpredicted sources. If you had been
planning the future of the computer industry in the 1970s, would you have asked Bill Gates and Paul
Allen? If you had been planning the future of European aviation in the 1980s, would you have asked
Michael O’Leary or Stelios Haji-Ioannou? If you had been planning the future of retailing in the 1990s
would you have asked Jeff Bezos? Of course not: members of the politburo, cabinet or large company
board would have consulted grey men in suits like themselves.
No, you better hope America doesn't unravel. Take a look around and see what you might get.
On Nov 09 12:12 PM ChickenLips wrote:
> Human history tells us this: the world is run by the rich for the
> rich. What else is new? The rich have all their wealth tied up in
> corporations. Corporations don't pay taxes because they get to deduct
> everything as an operating expense. Congress made that possible.
>
>
> I don't see the argument that we live in a socialist economy. If
> we did, we wouldn't have the widespread misery that we encounter
> on a daily basis. Massive unemployment, declining wages and benefits:
> these don't usually go hand in hand with socialism. But they do go
> in hand with a capitalist economy run amock.
>
> We need to make sure that EVERYBODY pays their fair share of taxes.
> You can't maintain a high standard of living if we keep issuing tax
> cuts while shifting jobs overseas. We are starting to feel the results
> of these bad fiscal policies, tax revenues to maintain our roads
> and schools are gone.
> Some people write about the "unravelling of America" because deep down that's what they wish for. ...
> No, you better hope America doesn't unravel. Take a look around and see what you might get.
------------
I personally don't think many Americans truly wish for an unraveling of the U.S. social fabric, other, perhaps, than some anarchists who are in the decided minority. Yeah, I think some might have a bit of an "it serves you right" attitude when confronted with the possibility, but any actual unraveling would bring about a chaos and hell that few could accurately anticipate and virtually none would embrace were it to come.
For what it's worth, however, I totally agree with your contention that the free market, for whatever faults it may have, is by far the best one for society that has yet been tried. It does however, require a moral society and framework to work correctly, however.
I remember wondering as a child why other countries did not try to imitate the American experiment in democracy and free markets, particularly the economically distressed ones.
I later came to the conclusion that much of the problem was the cultures in may of those distressed countries. Some had in fact tried to duplicate the American political and economic system. I believe one South American country had even copied much of our constitution, but things often didn't work out very well.
There are undoubtedly quite a few reasons why one couldn't just transplant U.S. laws into another country and expect similar results in short order, but one that seemed to keep coming up was corruption in the governments. Too many people were in line for kickbacks and requiring the hiring of friend's and family members for important positions, or their companies to do major jobs etc.
Unfortunately, I think more and more of that type of graft and corruption has worked its way into important parts of our governmental and societal structure.
I also think that more and more people are willing and ready to embrace socialistic remedies to what ails them.
Although I agree that discarding the free markets and an unraveling of our social fabric would be an unmitigated disaster, I agree with the author that we should not discount the possibility of that happening.
What is unique about today compared to previous economic downturns is communication capability. Up to now Americans' have respected our rule of law and, quite frankly, I am astounded that there has not been much, much more social disorder. I am personally ready for a revolution, but, like others, I am not going to start one. It will be interesting to see if or when we hit a tipping point.
The early Roman Republic army was composed of the lower class citizens who were given a pension, or sizable plot of land after serving 20 years. Unprecedented in ancient times and led to the development of a strong working/middle class which also powered the early Roman Republican army to greatness and eventual domination of most of Europe. I guess you could say the pension was a strong motivator of the citizenry.
However, it was also the practice of ancient times to take slaves, especially to make slaves of the conquered peoples. So, with each new territory/province conquered more and more slaves were brought into the Republic while at the same time, the ruling class corrupted the Senate to allow the confiscation of lands belonging to Roman soldiers who usually were in the field for years, at a time.
The end result was the increasingly large supply of slave labor was used to work the confiscated lands of the lower classes and thus began the decline of the Republic and its transition into Empire; because only through absolute rule could the ruling class continue to have its way.
Needless to say, a long process of deteriorating battle readiness of the Roman army also ensued and as time progressed more and more barbarian mercenaries were brought into the army to deal with this matter. By this time, the mercenaries had better morale than Roman citizen soldiers. I guess having the ruling class take your pension make dampen morale, somewhat...
To make the story short, yes, the ruling class got everything it wanted, it accumulated massive unprecedented wealth, and a few crazy emperors along the way.
But by the beginning of the end, when the barbarian Germanic hordes crossed the frozen rivers beginning in the third century AD, the rich, or ruling class, did not have the numbers in the army to hold back the massive numbers pouring across the border. In fact, most of the Roman Empire army by that time was barbarian mercenaries so we all know the end of that story.
By the end of the beginning of the end, the ruling class had lost it all and had been replaced by a barbarian ruling class. The masses? Well, to them life continue pretty much as it had before, with only a change of overlords.
Morale of the story is this: the middle class is the only thing separating the "barbarians" from the ruling class. The American ruling class destroys it at its peril.
> JeffDB, the "free market" mantra is getting stale and stinky. They
> aren't effecient and they certainly aren't "free".
----------
I think that there are certainly problems at times, including right now, where the implementation leaves much to be desired, and that there is just as certainly room for reform.
But I don't see any better alternatives. Do you? If so, what alternative would you propose?
The following thoughts try to address two matters your article raises.
First, the US dollar has been the world’s reserve currency since 1946 and, despite its many current problems, it is by no means clear that there is a substitute waiting in the wings to take its place. It remains the currency of account for international trade even though it is increasingly losing its standing as the undisputed measure of value (a trend that has its roots in the 1970s). Other nations accept (even if they will complain about it) that the US cannot resolve its share of the current debt bubble crisis without monetizing some portion of that debt. In short, the US, the UK and some other countries will have to engage in some currency devaluation but, provided this is done in a considered and organized manner over time in concert with all affected countries this need not end the US dollar role as the premier reserve currency or hurt the US economic position (it may in fact help the position). It must, however be seen to be a necessary part of a fair and responsible effort to place the global economy on a sound footing. No one should expect the US to retrace the mistakes of the UK in the 1920s in its misguided defense of pre-war value of the Pound.
Secondly, the US employment remuneration model developed in the 1940 must be rethought. By this I mean the pattern first developed in the auto manufacturing industry whereby employers became the primary source of health insurance, retirement income and other benefits for US workers. Some might argue (as was done by many during the GM reorganization last winter) that these benefits should be radically reduced or ended. Arguably his would be a mistake and it would be much better economically as well as socially if the national and state governments took on a significantly larger share of this benefits provision load from business, funded these matters through taxes and offered these benefits generally to citizens.
This would place small and large companies on a level playing field in the competition for employees, promote greater labour mobility, remove regional discrepancies, improve employee and citizen moral, allow management to focus more on their core business plan and remove the advantage that foreign companies from mature economy nations have (their labour costs are lower insofar as the benefits component is concerned). Obviously there is a tax cost for this and the challenge would be to find efficient and effective ways to design and administer these programs (and ensure that an appropriate share of these costs are covered by personal and not business taxes) so that this shift creates a net economic benefit. The difficult political case would have to be made for significant tax increases but, if that could be done to support military spending during the Cold War and beyond, this should not necessarily be seen as impossible provided a sound case can be made.
> Some people write about the "unravelling of America" because deep
> down that's what they wish for.
Well, of course. That IS what I wish for. I wish for a restoration of the time (pre-1865) when Americans were first and foremost citizens of their states, not of a nation with a strong central government. I wish for an America where the central government is weak because that's what the Framers of our Constitution wanted. They knew that a group of powerful men on the Potomac couldn't successfully dictate policy--economic or social--to the entire country.
In economics there's a principle of dis-economies of scale: when an organization gets too big, it actually destroys wealth through waste. That is what we have with the federal government: in its attempts to keep us safe, provide for the poor, satisfy workers, develop supposedly future technologies, and keep the environment clean, it actually does a pretty inefficient job.
The USPS is a perfect example. It has a monopoly on first class letter delivery yet last year lost $7 billion, and 2008 wasn't the only year that it's operated at a deficit. If the USPS was a private corporation--or even didn't have a de jure monopoly--it would be out of business by now.
I do not contend that state, local or municipal government is the paragon of efficiency. What I have seen, however, is that those governments are better able to adapt to on-the-ground situations than is the federal government.
Can't you see he's "what if'n" something he wants to see happen.
On Nov 09 03:44 PM JeffDB wrote:
> On Nov 09 02:48 PM TxTim wrote:
Jeff,
A wonderful comment...I couldn't have said it any better myself. When "situational ethics" start replacing "absolute values", examples such as you cite arise.
On Nov 09 01:47 PM JeffDB wrote:
> I think you make a good case for the tearing of the social fabric
> from an economic viewpoint, and I think it is something that should
> be a cause of concern for all.
>
> I do think, however, that you left out a very important dynamic underlying
> the economic one. I think the moral fabric of our country has already
> experienced some serious stresses and tears and that the potential
> breakdown of that moral fabric is more of a threat to our society
> and culture than even a class war type situation.
>
> Once a society loses its sense of morality all bets are off.
>
> I think we've already seen a lot of this lack of morality in the
> financial sector in the form of some of the unmitigated and heartless
> greed, highlighted of course, by the Madoff fiasco. But if those
> are or were isolated instances of just a few miscreants, I think
> a healthy society could survive. But I think the rot goes much deeper.
>
>
> Several years ago I remember listening to a former teacher relate
> a story about how he had been asked to substitute for a day or two
> in a class and agreed to come out of retirement to do so.
>
> I'm not sure how the subject originally came up, but at some point
> in he asked the class a pointed moral question. "If you wanted something
> really really bad and you saw it in a store and knew with absolute
> certainty that you could steal it and not get caught, who would do
> so?"
>
> He said to his astonishment that the entire class raised their hands.
> Taken aback, he asked "But isn't stealing wrong?"
>
> Student after student informed him that many people might think it
> is wrong, and perhaps he did, but neither he nor anyone else should
> impose their own particular morality on others. Because the answers
> were so similar from student to student, and with a little additional
> digging he finally figured out that that was what the school was
> teaching them. That type of "morality" was a part of the curriculum.
>
>
> As an insurance broker, I am required to take continuing education
> courses, and one of the newer requirements is to get some hours in
> "ethics". A couple of years a company offered a little half day
> seminar that included credit for a couple of hours of ethics, and
> included a free lunch so I gladly accepted.
>
> There are a number of issues that come up in our field that provide
> moral dilemmas or at least decision points where we have to do some
> discerning about the morality of choices we face. I was looking
> forward to the highlighting of such choices and a good discussion
> of the ethics involved in confronting them.
>
> I was disappointed, however, when the class turned out to essentially
> be a giant advertisement for Starbucks. They were giving away Starbucks
> books and coffee cups etc. and the instructor was really hyping how
> well their stock was doing and so on. It took a little while until
> the connection to ethics for insurance agents and brokers finally
> manifested itself.
>
> Starbucks' philosophy was one of being a very "green" company and
> also very "inclusive". They had a big emphasis on recycling and
> using recycled products from environmentally aware companies. They
> also made a point of hiring people not only with disabilities, but
> also with alternative lifestyles, such as homosexuals.
>
> I was disappointed of course at this obviously politically correct
> interpretation of ethics, and was also surprised at how much emphasis
> seemed to be placed on how this translated into profits and a soaring
> stock price.
>
> Oh well, I figured I was at least getting a few free credit hours
> and decided to enjoy my free lunch and write off a wasted morning.
>
>
> But at some point in the proceedings someone decided to bring the
> meeting back to what I had expected, the actual topic of ethics.
> Actually, it wasn't bringing it back, it was bringing it up for the
> first time.
>
> Unfortunately, I must have been reaching for a drink of Starbucks
> coffee or something and missed much of the original question from
> the audience. But her response was similar to what the kids in the
> aforementioned school had heard from *their* instructors.
>
> ~ "Well, ethics is a very personal thing, and *your* set of ethics
> might be very different from mine, or someone else's." I perked
> up a little and sure enough someone, perhaps the original questioner
> responded to her answer with another question... "But what if a
> terrorist kicked in the door to this room and started gunning people
> down, don't you think that would be unethical?"
>
> Her answer, which I hope would be astonishing to most people, is
> unfortunately, more pervasive in some areas of our society than many
> would imagine, continued on consistently with her premise...
>
> ~ "Well maybe it would seem unethical to me or to you, but it might
> be quite ethical to those doing so. They might feel they have good
> and valid, even heroic reasons for doing so..."
>
> Unfortunately, the discussion pretty much ended there. I don't know
> if it was just that the participants felt much as I did that it was
> a hopeless cause trying to change her mind in such a venue with such
> a limited amount of time, or if some actually agreed with her, or
> perhaps more likely, that she steered things away from that hot topic
> and back towards her original agenda so we could finish the meeting
> on time and get to that lunch. I think she just didn't call on anyone
> that raised their hand at that point.
>
> When the French historian and political writer, Alexis de Tocqueville,
> came to America in the 1830s to study why the US experiment in democracy
> seemed to be doing so well despite many predictions to the contrary,
> he wrote of his experiences during that study of American culture.
>
>
> He made strong note of the moral character of American culture at
> the time, how the churches were full on Sunday mornings among other
> things that made a strong impact upon him. He did also note that
> he felt there was a strong element of "indifferentism", an acceptance
> of differences of opinion on worship and morality, that perhaps helped
> keep the peace and yet he thought that might be the sowing of seeds
> for future problems.
>
> I think that has been the case, and that that indifferentism has
> spread much farther since the underlying national Judeo-Christian
> moral code permeated American culture due largely to immigration
> from Europe, aka "Christendom".
>
> Now we try to not only accomodate non-Christian ideals and sensibilities,
> into our moral fabric, but even atheistic ones. There have even
> been suits to accommodate satanic rituals in our prisons.
>
> It is my personal opinion that these accommodations are untenable
> in the long run and that will bring about some earthquakes in our
> society and societal structure.
>
> Unfortunately, "the lowest common moral denominator" among all cultures,
> religions and beliefs is pretty close to non-existent. Many/most
> of those beliefs can, of course be accommodated without much difficulty,
> but others are core values that are in diametrical conflict with
> each other.
>
> Whether "The Lord's Day" is on Saturday or Sunday or some other day
> is not all that divisive on a societal scale, nor is the shape of
> the church or which direction it faces, or which songs are played
> or myriad other details.
>
> But whether or not a marriage requires a man and a woman is a pretty
> big issue, as is whether or not it can ever be acceptable to deliberately
> kill innocent human beings.
>
> I think the deterioration in our moral fabric has progressed further
> and faster than many realize. I've read a number of stories about
> how police and judges are amazed at the complete lack of sorrow by
> those committing even quite heinous crimes.
>
> I remember one where a young boy, probably 6 or 7 years old had pushed
> a much younger child off a balcony to her death. He felt no remorse
> or compassion and in fact felt quite justified, since she had grabbed
> one of his toys.
>
> Another was a teen who had shot and killed store owner he was robbing.
> Even though the man had several small children, the young man said
> he wished it didn't have to happen, but he was completely justified
> in killing him. He had after all told the man not to move, but he
> moved a bit and that worried him so he "had to kill him".
>
> I read another study where students, presumably in an inner city
> environment, were asked about what their response should be if someone
> "dissed" them. The overwhelming response was that person deserved
> to be killed. No one blinked at the question or felt there was anything
> wrong with killing that person in cold blood. That was just their
> own particular moral code.
>
> Similarly, psychologists who studied the history of the leader in
> the Columbine killings came to the conclusion that he was a psychopath.
> He had no moral conscience. Neither killing, theft, murder, torture
> or anything else bothered him any more than wiping someone out on
> a video game would have. It was a phenomenon that they had tracked
> back through his history all the way back to his early childhood.
> Their conclusion was that it wasn't an issue of "bullying" as made
> out in the media, but of a complete and utter lack of morals and
> of a conscience.
>
> I remember a lawyer who wrote after a shooting somewhere about the
> fever in the media to outlaw guns. She noted that when she went
> to high school, the vast majority of the boys drove pickup trucks
> to school and virtually every one had a gun rack hanging behind the
> driver's seat. She said they periodically had fights, but that no
> one would have ever even considered running out to get a gun. It
> was a non-issue.
>
> Since then, our courts have mandated taking prayers out of schools,
> taking down any postings of the 10 commandments, including the admonition
> that "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and people are astonished at the growth
> in lawlessness throughout the land. That tearing of the moral fabric
> is not fixed by putting more metal detectors at the doorways and
> guards in the hallways.
On Nov 09 12:12 PM ChickenLips wrote:
> I don't see the argument that we live in a socialist economy. If
> we did, we wouldn't have the widespread misery that we encounter
> on a daily basis. Massive unemployment, declining wages and benefits:
> these don't usually go hand in hand with socialism. But they do go
> in hand with a capitalist economy run amock.
Opinions differ. The socialist economies of Cuba, Russia and China delivered far more misery than prosperity for the vast majority of their citizens for decades (in the case of the USSR, almost a century). China embraced caplitalism and has seen tremendous upsurge in the average wealth. India followed the socialist model until the 1980s, embraced capitalism and has the fastest growing middle class in the world.
There are many historical forces driving things besides the socialist or capitalist ideology of the political class. Probably almost everyhwere in the world is a hybrid of both systems at this point. It's hard to convincingly call the USA a real capitalist when we've just spent trillions to bail out banks and big corporations, when politicians are appointed to run huge enterprises they have no knowledge about (Clinton era apointees to Fannie and Freddie, including Rahm himself) etc.
On Nov 09 02:39 PM Tom E. wrote:
> The US has traditionally had a labor shortage economy throughout
> its history. If you didn't like where you were working you could
> always go or move somewhere else and find work.
>
> As in the Depression, that has now changed. Business has helped to
> create a labor surplus through off shoring and outsourcing. This
> will undermine American's traditional support for capitalism (as
> happened in the Depression).
Good point but you are leaving out immigration as a major factor. Mexicans have displaced blacks in no-skill and low-skill jobs to the point that urban black males without degrees are essentially unemployable in most cities. The path from the lower middle class to the middle-middle class has been severed by the importation of milions of East Indians and Chinese. One only needs to look at IT departments anywhere in the USA.
The political class has shown a disregard for the native born and a strange proclivity to support foreigners first. The biggest beneficiaries of Clinton and Bush's economic policies have been China and India, not the USA. The biggest winners from China and India are the thousands of kids who got to come here and get BA's and masters degrees in American state colleges.
Essentially many Americans have worked to pay high taxes to help educate the immigrants who will displace their kids.
SlumdogLawyer@Yahoo.com
Capitalism works great in a small business environment full of innovation and competition. When industries, companies or governments become too big and/or privileged "free markets" break down. Moreover, global commerce operating in nation states create instability within the individual states.
We should formally recognize these limitations and conflicts and adjust our democracy accordingly. This was already done in the 1930's. We should bring back Glass-Stegall and re-establish the original goals of the Federal Trade Commission. Finally, full labor utilization is what drives consumption, taxes and commerce generally. It should be what we "solve for" not just another input to a return on capital calculation.
I have no ideological bias other than that we are a nation of equality in principal.