Everybody who knows me is aware that I have an opinion about just about everything...and rarely hold back from expressing my thoughts.
So I've decided to put it all out here for your consideration. There is no specific topic of focus for this blog, and it will probably be all over the map. If it inspires me, I'll write about it. And whether or not you agree, I hope it makes you think... or laugh... or cry...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
Creative blog, Micahel. Fits you well. Since this is a political week, I'm going to add some political comments. I'm the guy your relatives won't like to hear. So I challenge them -- read my post. Don't be afraid, I won't name names, or swear, or hult insults. And I know it's long. I'm not gloating or trying to piss you off.
First off, I'm a liberal. BIG L liberal. Universal health care. Free college education. Social security and medicaire/medicaid. Equal pay for equal work. Fair taxes.
I'm also and angry liberal. I don't believe it's right for CEOs of most corporations to make 241 times the annual salary of their average worker. I believe that if an American company wants to move America jobs offshore, the executives need to go with those jobs, and shareholders should INSIST those executives get paid in wages consistent with workers in those countries. I believe that if we want to limit illegal immigration -- and we should -- the the board of directors and cheif executives of Archer Daniel Midland need to be rounded up and jailed for knowingly hiring illegals.
I'm not big of making people are when all is said and done aren't really criminal paying the price for the criminals who can afford the lawyers.
I come from east Texas. I was hunting by my 8th birthday. I was a Southern Baptist. I went to a Prebyterian University with an early goal of entering seminary.
I am none of that now.
Religion has no place in politics. I'm not even sure religious people should run for political office. Government has, is, and will work best when it is secular. The proof is there, don't believe me.
That said, what I want to talk about is the Obama election. Don't panic. True, things are going to change radically in the next few years, but not for the reasons you think. In addition to seminary, I also studied history. Bear with me a second or two.
There have been two guiding economic principals in the USA since Washington was elected president. Remember the Burr-Hamilton duel? Those men fought each other over these two principals.
1. Jeffersonian (Burr was a Jeffersonian). Jefferson believed that capital should be diverse, that it was better to have many small centers of capital creating jobs and stability from the bottom up. FDR was a Jeffersonian.
2. Hamilton believed that capital should be concentrated, and that there should be immensely powerful national banks and other financial institutions where the capital could pool and grow off interest before being invested. Reagan was a Hamiltonia.
So we've had this particular argument from day one. Some variations emerge from time to time, but we shuffle back and forth every so often favoring one over the other. These are the original notions of the ideas of "liberal" and "conservative" in the nation: Jefferson=Liberal, Hamilton=Conservative.
Now, every 40 years or so the economic pendulum about which way to go swings in this country. While there was some basic mixing, the post-Independence era is often referred to as the Jeffersonian Era. His brand of economic won, even though in the late 18-teens a US Bank was created.
In the 1820s we had the start of the Jacksonian era. Jackson hated the US Bank and the whole notion of east coast power brokers using capital to keep settlers and new industry from flourishing in the expanding west. However, the next 25 years or so of those who follwed Jackson in the Jacksonian Era did not. He gave his name to it, but it was a conservative economic period.
The Lincoln era further complicated matters by adding another twist in the game, and this is that before that can be a major shift of our economic pendulum there must a significant social event. In Lincon's case, it was the civil war. Lincoln, and the presidents until 1900, were forced into liberal economics in order to pay for the war and the Reconstruction. Capital had to be distributed to the middle to pay for the damage in the south.
This went on until the Spanish American War, the next major pendulum swing. You can pay for a civil war and reconstruction with liberal policies, but you cannot wage world war, drawing on commerical credit and markets from other countries without having a heavy investment of capital into your financial institutions.
Since we now had industry and manufacturing, we had tremendous trickle down investment, to use a modern term. This weathered a world war, and went on for almost 40 years until the significant social event of the Great Depression forever put an end to the days of unbridled trusts.
FDR instituted what was the first of the social committment economic policies. These were major undertakings, normally reserved or business, but administered under his government to ensure the growth truly was nationwide. Dams were built along the Tennessee River. Universal Service meant a telephone in every home. The WPA, and other such groups put people to work and kept the nation from the only two options in front of it: Turning fascist or communist.
FDR's era lasted until Nixon was elected president. Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, all FDR men. Ike spent more on highways, airports, and school projects than any other president of this era. LBJ's Great Society was an outreach speficially to minorities who had not received the benefits of previous economic efforts.
These are often blamed as "guns and butter," thus we not being able to afford both we should have stuck with guns -- Vietnam. This of course is a silly proposition, when just using money as the rationalization; we spent more than 1 trillion in today's dollars on Vietnam, but outlaid less than 300 billion on the Great Society in today's money.
In 1968 there was finally a twist on the social event. Nixon allied himself with the "Silent Majority," as he called it, as the pendelum again swang back towards the Hamilitonian economic approach. This overt play for a group of American voters who were coached entirely on social issues, but knew little about economics, was to completely change the relationship between political parties and the standard economic models of the USA. Not a particularly conservative man, Nixon ran on the cusp betweem Hamiltonian economics and for his day liberal social policies.
But the die was cast. Vietnam killed Nixon's presidency deader than Watergate, and the two crippled Ford's chance in the office. Carter was simply a caretaker president in this, the first of the modern era Hamilitonian presidents, and Ronald Reagan fulfilled this strange hybride of voters and economics that Nixon started. Reagan did so by casting his lot in with mostly fundamental Christian evangelical voters. He masqueraded draconian Hamiltonian measures under the guise of social issues. By keeping the electorate focused on divisive issues such as drugs, homosexuals, and the like, 60 years of regulations and other measures intended to keep a Hamiltonian economy from entering a meltdown were overriden.
Clinton was a Hamiltonian, and a victim of this new political block that put god, guns, guts, and gays as their top issues. That Clinton made no real moves to end the Hamiltonian economy was irrelevant, as was the fact he did nothing radical about the social issues (unless you count don't ask don't tell, or to sign an agreement limiting the purchase of assault style weapons that was started in the Bush administration).
W of course was a Hamiltonian, more radical even than Reagan. But W finally broke Hamiltonian economics, broke its back. Not just no regulation, W combined no regulation with people with no skill to regulate. He started TWO war -- needed or not we're not discussing here -- and kept borrowing while expanding the size of the federal government such that it went from 4 trillion in 2001 to 11 trillion in debt in 2008. He stopped using budgets. He instead ran the government on special expenditures, and hidden spending requests. We have still not tallied the 2004 budget to get to total expenditures and revenues.
And on top of this lunacy -- imagine running your business where you borrow and buy but don't produce -- he borrowed from countries that are not friendly to us. We owe more money now to China, Russia, and Saudia Arabia than we owed in total in 2000.
These two wars, combined with the lack of regulation and greed on Wall Street, have combined to give us another social event. The conservative ideology under Reagan, more so under W, has been driven into two distinct competing sets of beliefs. Economically, once Hamiltonian but now referred to as Randism as in Ayn Rand the conservative economic philosopher has been proven in error. Alan Greenspan and his entire cronies from his era on the Federal Reserve said as much the week before the election, claiming that their philosophy of capital and institutional banking had been proven wrong, so much so that it was a "world shaking event to them."
Let that sink in... the leading proponents of the modern version of Hamilton economics admitted that the past 40 years of their policies no longer work in the modern age. Shipping jobs overseas for shareholders? Wrong. Trickle down? Flawed. Unbridled capital traded on open markets? Flawed because there is no free market.
This idea alone is going to take 10 years to sink in with conservatives.
This election showed another pillar of modern conservativism has also run its course, and that is social conservativism. You cannot legislate morality in others. You can't make them be you. You cannot install a religious framework as a litmus test for government workers and expect them to focus on anything but religion.
Government is flawed. It works well when it has decent people to manage it and work in it. Government won WW2. Our highways come from government. Those planes in the sky are the result of sound government policies, as are the lights to your homes, the telephones in your home, business, and pocket, and those cars you drive that use gasoline. Did you know the first major car manufacturers made steam driven cars, but they were unsafe and too costly to build, so the federal government under president Taft stepped in to move manufacture to gasoline.
This election marks a turning point from both Hamilton -- the flawed -- to Jefferson, the neglected economics. The major social issue that drove this election were two wars of questionable worth to the republic as a whole, and the final answer in the civil rights debate about skin color.
We will spend the next 40 years in Jeffersonian economics. You cannot fight it, indeed, we all need it. Bridges need to be built. Our schools, both buildings and teachers, need upgrades. The world's climate, whether you want to believe it or not, has 10 years left before we go to the 2nd degree of average temperature increase. TEN YEARS. 2 degrees is a tipping point. If we can hold it there, then we won't run to 3, 4, and 5 degrees.
Five degrees means what we now consider coast along the Gulf, the Atlantic, and the major rivers like the Mississippi all rise 20 feet. No ifs, ands or buts. And we have 10 years to change that by ending our reliance on fossil fuels.
And that's just if we do it. The Chinese and Indians won't. But if we go to green technologies we stop the rise.
Not to mention we pull ourselves out of the economic mess we're in. Why on earth would anyone be opposed to creating 10 million or more decent-paying, manufacturing jobs in the USA, raising our standard and quality of life, but all we have to do is stop using gasoline and instead use alternative fuels?
Please, stop fearing liberals. I know your talks shows and television stations go on and on with one side of the story. But there are MANY sides to the story. Taxes are a small price to pay to keep 100 million Americans from becoming flooded out refugees.
Think about it.
And we don't want your guns. They won't do us any good with the problems in front of us -- unless we choose to stubbornly not solve them.
Post a Comment