|
Monday, June 20, 2005Marcus is on a tear today. One might expect him to storm the barricades of capitalism, were they not everywhere. Still, he raises a couple useful points.The point of greatest interest is what exactly it means to be a limousine liberal. The short answer, I believe, can best be expressed by an opposition: The difference between an exploitative "capitalist" and a limousine "liberal" is that the limousine liberal feels bad about what he would not change whereas the exploitative capitalist doesn't. One notes, for example, that the doors to the Kennedy compound are not traditionally thrown open to the homeless on cold, winter nights. And Teddy has not acquired a reputation for adjusting tips upwards to assure the doorman, waiters and others he encounters are brought up to what he considers a living wage. One notes, as well, that the Kennedy estates have traditionally been admired for the way they kept the money in the family, not the way they carefully gave back to the proles a share of what old Joe had sponged off of those masses by means of widespread addiction to drink. I do not pick on the Kennedys because they are singularly open to criticism. I pick on them because it is fun. Still, there are many others like them, liberals compassionate to excess when asked to hold forth yet careful not to let an extra dime slip into the hands of either the exploited Italian worker who stitched their leather shoes nor the exploited salesman who fitted them for it. The question we face, though, is what to do about it. Do we lift up our voices in praise for the exploitative capitalist who is honest about it? Do we condemn the whole lot? The problem you run into is that the wealthy classes have their purpose too. They funded Columbus' voyage, funded the East India Company, funded many of the corporations of yesterday and today that have, by means of losing billions on bad ideas, stumbled on a few good ideas that have done us well. The rich, provided they combine the right measure of cleverness and gullibility, provide us with someone prepared to lose enough money in the search for the next winner that a highly organized and specialized society can push forward. Don't believe me? Look how well a country does once it nationalizes industry and the rich take flight. The big problem we face today is a lack of the properly hyper-rich, those looking for the next big thing rather than merely seeking to maintain their capital by means of squeezing ever more out of their workers while minimizing risk. As the middle class has become the new rich, the rich have become increasingly middle class in their habits. As in, why invest in a brand new idea that may or may not work when you can start a factory for a product with an existing market, locate it in a poorer region and simultaneously impoverish overpaid workers at the old factory, which is undersold, and the new one where the workers will put up with whatever it takes to keep their job. The real killer in globalism is not that good jobs are being shipped overseas. It's that instead of using the freed capital to develop the next big thing, the folks at the top are hoarding it for the next recession, lawsuit, etc. A particularly insidious problem in this mess is a subset of the rich that Marcus ostensibly speaks for: The unions. GM spent as much on health care last year as it spent on steel. Think about that, folks. The uninsured pizza delivery boy in the hatchback who can barely make car payments and definitely can't afford a medical emergency? A quarter of his income is going to make sure that 50 year old auto workers in Detroit can keep their boat and cabin in Northern Michigan while somebody else picks up the bill if he has heart problems. If the pizza guy gets sick, he loses his job, loses his car and goes bankrupt when his credit runs out. If the union guy gets sick - and enough of his buddies do too - the pizza delivery guy's car payment goes up the next time he needs a new car - with no improvement in the car. Here in California, we've got teachers' unions and nurses' unions alleging that Schwarzenegger is the Boston strangler's first cousin because he thinks tenure and benefits need to be limited. We hear radio ads about how awful it is that the governor wants to balance the budget on the backs of teachers and nurses - oops, of kids and the sick. But on who else's back might you balance it. The superrich in California are wealthy in stock options they can't cash out and homes that (right now) can only be sold at a loss. The folks with free income are the public sector workers whose pay goes up like clockwork come what may. If anybody else's business is in the red, no bonuses or raises is the least of the problem. Reduced hours and reduced wages - for you or your replacement if you won't take the cut - are the real story. And this, folks, is not about jobs shipped to India. It's about a system that decided unions and a few other categories were entitled, no matter what, and that balanced the budgets on the backs of the rest of us. All that's happening now is that the unions got greedy enough that they couldn't be sustained. Twenty-five years ago, it was an embarrassment to drive a foreign car (save for BMW and a few other high end marks). It meant that not only were you poor, but you didn't give a damn about your country. That stigma's gone. Detroit had ten years to take advantage of it by showing that once America got moving, it couldn't be stopped. In that time, Detroit didn't do jack. Twenty-five years ago, using American steel in America was obvious. How could you pay to ship it from another continent when there was a yard next door? The Pennsylvania and Ohio plants had ten years to take advantage of this. In that time, they didn't do jack. To this day, the only efficient steel producers in the US are, by and large, the minimills. Twenty-five years ago, American textile workers enjoyed protections that kept the clothing prices high and foreign workers out. They had a decade or two to streamline and show that American quality and ingenuity beat out shoddy but cheap foreign products any day of the week. They sat on their hands. Unions aren't the idle rich, but they act like it. Given a form of capital - borrowed time in which to catch up - they turn their attention almost invariably to maximizing profits today as opposed to preparing for tomorrow. As sure as the railroads fought the emerging airlines rather than using logistical expertise to become the freighters of tomorrow, unions have fought the emerging labor markets rather that using their lead in proximity to market and superior skills to maintain an edge. Bottom line: Marcus' diagnosis of what happens today isn't always that far off. But it misses the point that our biggest problem is not exploitation by the wealthy but the creation of new classes that feel entitled to the trappings of wealth, including an investor class that is less interested in being a part of the next Microsoft than getting 2% above market while the companies they invest in lay off another ten or fifteen hundred workers to keep dividends even. This is not a problem of excessive wealth, but of wealth wedded to a poverty mentality. George W. isn't always the sharpest crayon in the box, but he hit the nail on the head when he said we need to make the pie higher. The solution in the long run, isn't to create barriers that allow unions or others to join the investor class in exploiting the rest of us. It's to keep pushing for the open flow of information to follow the flow of goods. We brought down the Soviets with blue jeans and rock and roll. We'll bring down the slave-labor "capitalism" of China the same way. That Microsoft is protecting prying Chinese eyes from words like freedom and democracy tells us we're already making inroads. By the way, I realize Marcus looks a little at the unions as exploiters bit. But I don't think he quite gets to the real point, namely that this is no longer between rich and poor, unions and management or any other such old line dichotomy. Rather, this is a battle between those who have managed to entrench their privileges in social and governmental systems vs. those who are left to pay for it. Globalisation is not really, in this vein, about business colluding with ideologues in a race to the bottom against the poor. The globalisation/fair trade game is really about two entitlement interests attempting to strangle each other in order to grab the remainder of a shrinking, unsustainable pool of money whose origin is systemic, rather than the result of real labor. The problem we truly face is that something has to give. The difference between "capitalist" exploiters and limousine "liberals," to return to an earlier theme, is that the capitalists don't care that it's us, while the liberals would prefer to pretend it isn't while screaming about capitalists to salve their consciences till they get the tinted window rolled up. 
posted by gbarto at 9:49 PM |
Archives
|
Day By Day© by Chris Muir.Old TurkeyBlog here.
